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Online Master of Science in Business Analytics Curriculum
The Online MSBA program from Seattle University is designed to prepare you for the realities of messy data sets and unclear business obstacles. Develop key quantitative skills, including R and Python programming, Apache Hadoop and Spark, SQL, and more. At Albers, we know that your success in business analytics requires that you hone your communication and leadership skills alongside your technical capabilities. The Online MSBA will challenge you to master written, oral, and visual communication so that upon completing the program, you will emerge as an ethical and adaptive leader of business analytics, able to translate data into decisive action.
Data Translation Challenges
Each Online MSBA course incorporates one or more Data Translation Challenges designed to help you develop a methodological approach to data analysis geared toward its eventual presentation to a diverse business audience.
In each of these assignments, you will follow a three-step approach for analyzing and understanding complex data and synthesizing that data to develop informed business strategies:
- Consider a business problem derived from real-world data sets and scenarios
- Analyze the data using computational tools
- Communicate your findings and recommendations via written, oral, and/or visual methods
While Data Translation Challenges may vary in size and significance to your grade from class to class, each one is designed to model the business challenges you will likely face in an analytical role and help you grow into a data-fluent, multifaceted professional who can overcome them.
Online R and Python Programming Prep Course
All new students in the Online MSBA program are required to complete a prep course in the R and Python programming languages prior to the beginning of their first term. This six-hour course will be offered online and may be completed before or during your New Online Student Orientation.
Designed for those with or without coding experience, the course helps students develop the beginner skills and experience needed so they are fully prepared for their MSBA coursework. During the prep course, students will:
- Install Python and R on their machines
- Familiarize themselves with basic syntax
- Learn basic programming in Python and R
OMSBA 5112 Statistics for Business Analytics (3 credits)
This course reviews key statistical concepts and provides a conceptual introduction to regression analysis.
OMSBA 5061 Programming I for Business (3 credits)
This introductory-level course uses the Python programming language. Topics include expressions, control logic, data structures, and functions. We will demonstrate usage of several Python data analytics modules. Students will learn how to design programs to solve problems drawn from real-world examples.
OMSBA 5280 Law and Ethics for Business Analytics (3 credits)
This course will examine the opportunities and challenges introduced by business analytics through the perspectives of the law and ethics. Rapidly evolving technologies that permit the collection, storage, aggregation, analysis, and use of data create opportunities for financial benefit and the common good, but also create challenges to legal rights such as privacy, equality, and dignity, and to ethical values such as autonomy, trust, and virtue. The course will be framed as a contextual examination of business analytics to facilitate learning about legal and ethical standards for private organizations using data analytics techniques in various stages of the data life cycle. This is a dynamic course which presents a rich basis for student learning and contemplation of central questions for “big data,” including issues related to acquisition and use of data, professional and social responsibility in the application of modern technologies, the efficacy of management by algorithm, and the loss of human control in using artificial intelligence. The following are examples of legal and ethical issues that may be included, subject to time constraints: In law: information privacy law such as U.S. tort law, federal statutory and administrative law, and constitutional protection of civil liberties; European Union data privacy regulation; cyber intelligence and cybersecurity regulation; contractual liability, specifically with respect to third-party reliance on data analysis; the law of negligence; and agency law. In ethics: adverse effects of data collection on vulnerable populations; transparency and honesty in the cleaning, processing, and visualization of data; introduction of the machine equivalent of implicit bias in feature selection; and responsibilities when using data analysis as a tool to guide human decision-making. Registration restrictions may be bypassed by the department with permission of instructor.
OMSBA 5210 Data Wrangling, Visualization, and Communication (3 credits)
This course teaches the essential and practical skills necessary to communicate information about data clearly and effectively through written, oral, and graphical means. Students will learn and practice with advanced visualization tools to effectively communicate. The course will build from the understanding of data to the presentation of the analysis. Data visualization “storytelling" will provide tools to effectively: communicate ideas, summarize, influence, explain, persuade, and provide evidence to an audience. Visualization can convey patterns, meaning, and results extracted from: multivariate, geospatial, textual, temporal, hierarchical, and network data. During the course, students will deliver presentations using these techniques, and they will also learn to critically evaluate other presentations.
OMSBA 5062 Programming II for Business (3 credits)
This is an intermediate course in computational problem-solving using Python with a focus on using medium to large datasets to inform business decisions and strategy. Skills developed include information visualization, simulations to model randomness, computational techniques to understand data, and informative statistical techniques. Some exposure to optimization problems and dynamic programming, computational statistics, and machine learning.
OMSBA 5305 Economics and Business Forecasting (3 credits)
Techniques for applied business forecasting with emphasis on time-series methods. A survey of regression-based and time-series methods, models for stationary and non-stationary time series, estimation of parameters, computations of forecasts and confidence intervals, and evaluation of forecasts.
OMSBA 5240 Enhancing Stakeholder Relationships in the Age of Analytics (3 credits)
This course helps you address traditional problems in management and marketing with data and data analysis in ways that could not have been imagined a few years ago. You will think critically about how effective stakeholder management can enable the realization of business value, and understand how poor handling of data and relationships can negatively impact organizational outcomes.
OMSBA 5270 Analytics for Financial Decisions and Market Insights (3 credits)
Because of data, managers can measure, and hence know, radically more about their business, and directly translate that knowledge into improved decision-making and performance. The knowledge created by the data analysis can also help firms to make better financial decisions as well as predicting the reaction by the financial markets or more specifically providers of capital. For example, should we restructure our business? You would want to know: How will the investors react to the announcement of the restructuring? Will it cause a sell-off in the market therefore create a capital crunch? Will this decision have implications for the future performance of the company? This course will provide a basic methodology to help you answer these kinds of questions with an emphasis of performance and financial markets. We will specifically cover firm valuation with an emphasis on accounting information, dividend policy choices and compensation policies of real-time firms that are publicly traded. The strength of the course stems from the idea that we will be using real-life business decisions, with real-data and will use real modeling experiences that have been widely used in the industry.
OMSBA 5315 Big Data Analytics (3 credits)
“Big data” is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data tools have been evolved to the application of analytic techniques to very large, diverse data sets that often include varied data types and streaming data, i.e., parallel computing, MapReduce, NoSQL, etc. This class will discuss big data tools, analysis, and use cases.
OMSBA 5145 Database Management (6 credits)
This course introduces the fundamental concepts of popular database systems, including structured (relational), semi-structured (NoSQL), and unstructured (Big Data) databases and database systems.
The first half of the course is focused on the relational model and SQL queries, using Microsoft SQL Server for practice and assignments.
The second half of the course dives into the data management concepts of MongoDB and Hadoop, respectively, and provides an opportunity for students to query data structures that are distinctly different from the traditional SQL relational databases.
The first half of the course is focused on the relational model and SQL queries, using Microsoft SQL Server for practice and assignments.
The second half of the course dives into the data management concepts of MongoDB and Hadoop, respectively, and provides an opportunity for students to query data structures that are distinctly different from the traditional SQL relational databases.
OMSBA 5300 Applied Econometrics (3 credits)
Fundamentals of econometrics and use of econometric techniques in financial and economic research and decision-making. Topics include simple linear regression, residual analysis, multivariate regression, and the generalized linear model. The course will stress computer applications.
OMSBA 5068 Artificial Intelligence for Business (3 credits)
This course focuses on basic principles of artificial intelligence and on applications of AI in business settings, such as customer service, sales, and marketing. An introduction to core AI concepts, systems, and applications, such as natural language processing, voice recognition, robotics, vision, and machine learning, is followed by discussions—and in some cases applications—of key enabling technologies. Case studies are introduced to generate business insights and to help determine when investments in AI produce significant returns. Upon conclusion, students should have a broad understanding of several AI enabling technologies, and how they can be used to support business needs.
OMSBA 5067 Machine Learning (6 credits)
This course explores fundamental concepts for developing machine-learning models to solve business problems by analyzing massive amounts of data to find interesting patterns that can be used to assist decision making or provide predictions. Topics covered include regression, decision trees, clustering algorithms, naïve Bayes classification, evaluation metrics, model refinement, ensemble methods, neural networks and deep learning, dimensionality reduction, and association rule mining. Students are expected to analyze real-world data in business using machine learning tools.
Prerequisite: C or better in OMSBA 5061 (Programming I) and OMSBA 5112 (Applied Statistics)
Prerequisite: C or better in OMSBA 5061 (Programming I) and OMSBA 5112 (Applied Statistics)
OMSBA 5510 Capstone Project in Business Analytics (3 credits)
The Capstone is an application of data analytics in the planning and execution of a real-life development project for an industry partner. Students will work individually or in small project teams to define and carry out an analytics project from beginning to end. Key steps include: scoping the project, locating an industry partner, formalizing a question, finding data sources, determining the method of analysis, implementing the analytical procedure, and communicating the results to the client. This process will help students integrate what they have learned in multiple courses and apply their expertise to solve a problem for a real-world enterprise. This course is typically taken during the last quarter of the student’s program of study.