The tug of war between individual freedom and institutional power is a continuing theme of history. Early on, the focus was on the church; more recently, it is was on the civil state. Today, the debate is about making corporate power compatible with the needs of a democratic society. The modern corporation has not only created untold wealth and given individuals the opportunity to express their genius and develop their talents but also has imposed costs on individuals and society. How to encourage the liberation of individual energy without inflicting unacceptable costs on individuals and society, therefore, has emerged as a key challenge.

The current corporate governance models of today’s organizations are unfit for organizations of the future, and even today. What does this mean for directors and the management? Let’s have a look into the future, divided into long-term, middle-term, and short-term future lenses.

The objective of this course is to learn the financial tools needed to make good business decisions. The course presents the basic insights of corporate finance theory, but emphasizes the application of theory to real business decisions. Each session involves class discussion, some centered on lectures and others around business cases.

Thompson Rivers University (TRU) has developed an OER in financial management consisting of 21 learning modules that can be used to teach courses in introductory and advanced financial management at the undergraduate and graduate levels as well as a course in business valuations. Each module consists of a detailed reading, presentation slides, learning problems, and answer keys. A number of case studies in areas such as financial statement analysis, financing planning, capital budgeting, and cost of capital are also included along with sample course outlines.

Faculty can select whatever modules they feel are needed to achieve the specific learning outcomes for a course. As OERs, faculty are also free to modify the readings, problems, or case studies so they better meet their needs and those of their students. These modules can be quickly imported into a learning management system such as Moodle or Blackboard to produce a challenging face-to-face or online learning experience.

With the rising cost of education, particularly textbooks, faculty are obligated to “adopt and adapt” OERs whenever possible to help their students.

This course in organizational economics prepares doctoral students for further study in the field. The course introduces the classic papers and some recent research. The material is organized into the following modules: boundaries of the firm, employment in organizations, decision-making in organizations, and structures and processes in organizations. Each class session covers a few leading papers.
This course was joint-taught between faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. The Harvard course is Economics 2670 Organizational Economics.