Advance your career, one course at a time.
Graduate-level business courses designed to build skills without the long-term commitment of a full degree.
What are Open Courses?
Open Courses offer a simple, low-commitment way to experience Simon’s graduate-level learning. Each course allows you to develop practical business skills and earn academic credit that can later apply toward a Simon degree or certificate. It’s a direct, hands-on way to test-drive graduate study.
Why should you enroll?
Whether you’re advancing in your current career or exploring new directions, Open Courses let you gain new insights from expert faculty and apply them immediately. You’ll study alongside Simon’s degree-seeking students, earning 2.5 credits while strengthening your professional skills and résumé.
Upcoming Registration Deadlines
Registration is simple—no essays or transcripts required.
Deadlines are two weeks before classes begin.
Next Deadline:
March 4, 2026 (Spring B)
Find a course that fits your interests and your schedule.
Each open course is 2.5 credits unless otherwise noted, and credits count toward our Professional and Executive MBA programs, but may be applied to other programs in select cases.
- GBA 478 – AI and Business (In Person)
Professor: Dan Keating & Liza Mohr
Schedule: Tuesdays, 5:40 – 9:00 p.m.
Registration Deadline: March 2GBA478 covers the application of generative AI technologies across diverse business contexts. The course will help you understand how to integrate Generative AI into today’s business workflows, providing frameworks to decide when and how to use it effectively. You’ll gain hands-on experience designing Generative AI tools to create business value and programming basic LLM-driven applications in Python. Finally, the course will ask you to become conversant with the big questions about Generative AI, to debate the moral, philosophical, and ethical challenges inherent in these systems and technologies.
- GBA 441 – Business Ethics & Corporate Social Responsibility (In Person)
Professor: Andras Miklos
Schedule: Thursdays, 5:40 – 9:00 p.m.
Registration Deadline: March 2This course deals with business ethics and the social responsibility of business organizations. Through class discussions and case studies, students explore the theory and practice of business ethics and develop their ability to recognize and address ethical issues. The course equips students with analytical skills in ethical reasoning and provides them with a substantive framework to deal with ethical challenges they are likely to encounter in their careers. Topics include corporate responsibilities vis-à-vis employees, customers, and society; insider trading; discrimination in employment and in the sharing economy; advertising and sales tactics; ethics in pricing; bribery; executive pay; intellectual property in the pharmaceutical industry; censorship; health care resource allocation; and environmental responsibilities.
- OMG 416 – Project Management (In Person)
Professor: Jeff Sokol
Schedule: Wednesdays, 5:40 – 9:00 p.m.
Registration Deadline: March 2The topics treated in this course span a wide spectrum of issues, concepts, systems, and techniques for managing projects effectively in today’s complex business environment. Students are led through a complete project life cycle, from requirements analysis and project definition to start-up, reviews, and phaseout. Important techniques for controlling project costs, schedules, and performance are studied. The course employs a combination of lectures, case analyses, business/project simulations, videos, Internet resources, and group discussions to develop the conceptual understanding and operational skills needed for effective managerial role performance.
- GBA 411 – Business Modeling (In Person)
Professor: Huaxia Rui
Schedule: Evenings
Registration Deadline: May 4This course has two major objectives: to develop your ability to frame business decision problems in a way that makes them amenable to quantitative analysis, and to train you in some fundamental techniques useful for analyzing and solving these problems. The course draws on three toolkits: 1. Spreadsheets to model business problems. 2. Optimization techniques to solve complex decision problems involving many variables and constraints. 3. Monte Carlo simulation for understanding and analyzing uncertainty. Examples from different functional areas will demonstrate how the techniques taught can be applied in a practical way to a variety of settings.
- CIS 401 – Info Systems for Management (In Person)
Professor: Roy Jones
Schedule: Evenings
Registration Deadline: May 4Information technology is transforming firms, markets, products, and processes with remarkable speed. Recent developments in AI have the potential to further accelerate the transformation. This presents managers with new challenges and valuable opportunities. This course dives into the strategic use of information technology within a business context, focusing on how it can enable competitive advantage, enhance business processes, and drive innovation. The course introduces a number of useful frameworks for analyzing the use of information technology and AI in organizations and includes some exposure to database and data visualization tools. The strategic and economic impacts of information technology are emphasized. The course is designed with line and senior managers in mind, as opposed to the managers of the IS function.
Discover Simon Open Courses
Are you looking to strengthen your professional toolkit without committing to a full degree program? Join us for an informative webinar to learn how Simon Business School’s Open Courses can help you take the next step in your career. In this session you’ll learn what Simon Open Courses are and which courses are being offered this term, more about our flexible options—whether you’re interested in testing the waters before pursuing a certificate or degree or simply want to build specific skills, information about employer tuition benefits, and more!
Tuition & Benefits
Open Courses are billed at Simon’s current per-credit hour tuition rate. Many employers offer tuition assistance—check with your HR or benefits team to see if your Simon course may be fully or partially covered. University of Rochester employees may also be eligible for employee tuition benefits.