Wharton/Coursera: An introduction to Operations Management

Platform: Coursera

Length/Start date: Eight weeks long, and starts September 30

Time commitment/prerequisites: Five to seven hours a week. The course is "designed for business students and executives," but there are no academic or math requirements.

Why you should take it: This is the second course in Wharton's "MBA Foundation Series," which teaches a lot of what a first-year student enrolled at the school would learn. Anyone who has hopes to rise from being an employee to managing or running a company needs to learn some of the key principles behind analyzing and improving business processes, boosting productivity, and meeting higher standards.

The professor, Christian Terwiesch is a multiple award-winner for his teaching at Wharton, and wrote one of the most popular textbooks on operations management.