Weill Medical College of Cornell University · Courses
eCornell ILR
24 courses with the subject eCornell ILR, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
eCornell ILR501Mediation for Managers0
Mediation is widely used to settle disputes ranging from conflict between neighbors to conflict between nations. Though personal disagreements and international commerce don't share the same substance or consequences, the key procedural elements of the mediation process are the same for both, so workplace conflicts tend to take the same shape regardless of the industry or the size of the conflict. In this course you will focus on the use of mediation in resolving organizational conflict where the manager or supervisor serves in the role of mediator. Even if you are not a trained mediator, you can draw on proven mediation techniques to help resolve workplace conflict in productive ways. During this course, you will closely examine a workplace scenario and practice properly setting expectations for mediation of that conflict. In each module, new information will be revealed that will ask you to adapt to the various needs of the disputing parties. Additionally, you will practice handling unforeseen emotional outbursts in a productive way and ultimately propose solutions that consider everyone's interests. Through creative work in examining the scenario and reflecting on how the lessons might apply to your own workplace conflicts, you will learn how to expertly prevent inevitable workplace conflicts from escalating.
eCornell ILR511Interpreting and Communicating Data0
This course aims to make statistical analysis approachable and practical, as you learn how to read and interpret statistical reports in a business environment, and how to communicate statistical results to stakeholders. First, you will practice assessing the statistical components and representations of statistical results in a case study. You will then identify the appropriate method and conduct a summary analysis of a data set. Finally, you will prepare an executive summary of the key statistical points identified through your analysis and create a narrative summary with supporting graphics.
eCornell ILR512Using Statistical Tests to Make Decisions0
In this course, you will practice making informed decisions based on statistical results. You will be introduced to the techniques you will use to view statistical tests critically and recognize the limitations of statistical conclusions. Next, you will examine statistical reports in order to identify the underlying research question. You will then use these insights to compare tests and rate their validity. Finally, you will prepare a report for stakeholders, providing recommendations based on your interpretation of statistical results. It is recommended to only take this course if you have completed Interpreting and Communicating Data or have equivalent experience.
Choosing the most appropriate statistical test to answer your research questions will affect every aspect of your report. This course will focus on identifying the right test for your question. You will explore the relationship between the data set and the results obtained through statistical tests. You will practice writing a memo to your data analyst specifying the appropriate statistical test to answer your question. In selecting your testing methods, you will also consider the ethical implications of the test results. It is recommended to only take this course if you have completed Interpreting and Communicating Data and Using Statistical Test to Make Decisions or have equivalent experience.
eCornell ILR514Making Predictions With Data Models0
Making statistical predictions based on real-world data is complex and requires a more rigorous statistical model. In this course, you will learn to apply multivariate regression statistical models to make predictions. First, you will identify the variables that best explain your results and define the relationships between dependent and independent variables. You will then practice identifying and interpreting the results of a multiple regression model and making predictions based on that model. It is recommended to only take this course if you have completed Interpreting and Communicating Data, Using Statistical Test to Make Decisions, and Applying Statistical Tests or have equivalent experience.
This course establishes a foundation in collective bargaining, with a focus on identifying and analyzing key aspects of a contract and how they relate to your role. You will gain insights into the bargaining process and what happens when negotiations break down. Those insights will prepare you to assess contracts and determine the requirements for administering its key components.
This course will help build your skills in the "nuts and bolts" of effective labor negotiations. You will start by identifying the organizational goals central to your bargaining strategy, then see how to move from these business goals to negotiation goals. You'll take a look at the impact of external factors and share your analysis of these factors in a discussion with your peers. Your deep understanding of the collective bargaining agreement, the unit, and the employer will lay the groundwork for success. This course provides a combination of theory and practical applications, down to expert advice on how to manage the administrative aspects of negotiations. Finally, you will choose an appropriate collective bargaining strategy for your organization. Will you take a fostering approach or a forcing approach? And how do you determine which is best? How do you mix the two approaches effectively, and what are the pitfalls you need to avoid? And lastly, you'll evaluate behaviors and styles that make negotiating so challenging. This course includes a negotiation simulation with peers.
The parties in any collective bargaining contract negotiation are seeking to balance costs and benefits in order to achieve mutual agreement. Developing proficiency in assessing relative value and costs of a benefit improves your ability to compare apples to oranges. Costing a contract entails a comfort with the fundamentals of workplace math and statistics, as well as the ability to effectively communicate this aspect of negotiation. Are you prepared to estimate numbers and explain them? The importance of this foundation is often underestimated. This course fills gaps for both management and labor by developing a new mindset for costing a contract. You will use basic costing tools to calculate the value of a collective bargaining contract with a focus on calculating and communicating relative value and costs. You will explore the six key principles to estimate costs in order to create agreement proposals. At the conclusion of the course, you will have applied the tools and principles to a sample proposal and counterproposal. You will have practiced the skills to assess the contract's impact to employees and developed strategies for educating stakeholders. Whether you're making a counterproposal or you're ready to get a contract ratified, you will be better able to explain your numbers with the confidence and experience gained from this course.
When grievances occur, taking a strategic approach is the key to productive outcomes. It takes preparation and a solid grasp of the facts and context of a situation to conclude whether a complaint is a grievance that should be heard and resolved. A complaint becomes a grievance when the issue is specified in the contract language. By reading the grievance clause carefully, you can determine whether a complaint should be heard as a grievance and consider resolution possibilities from the perspective of both parties. This course will advance your ability to read grievance clauses effectively. You will explore the specific language included in these clauses and recognize meaning provided by common rules of interpretation. With the tools needed for solving problems and the confidence to employ them, you can overcome potential obstacles in the grievance resolution process.
For a variety of reasons, workplace grievances aren't always resolved through negotiation and require arbitration. The outcome of the arbitration hearing is determined by the arbitrator, but as a participant in an arbitration you have a critical role in the process and the results. In this course you will review the typical components of a hearing and, using proven processes and tools, practice the steps of arbitration. You'll discover what a hearing looks like, how a hearing proceeds, and who participates. You'll analyze cases to identify facts critical to your argument and develop a theory that will lead to an issue statement. By becoming familiar with strategies for questioning witnesses, you will be prepared to present your opening and closing arguments.
In this course, you will examine what equity means and how it manifests within a community. You will identify causes of and solutions to equity issues by looking at systemic forces, power differentials, and implicit biases. You will hear directly from activists working for equitable communities, and you will consider how arts and culture are essential in building community, supporting development, and contributing to economic opportunity. In addition, you will investigate how the stories of a place are told by examining who gets to tell them. You will also look at how these stories advance group interests and consider what impacts the stories have. Throughout this course, you will gain a basic understanding of major forms of inequity in the United States economic, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, national origin, and religion. You will participate in several relevant discussions with peers, advancing your own and others' knowledge of the issues, and work on a course journal, using multiple ways of learning to examine equity through different lenses. Your course experience will culminate in a multi-part course project, in which you will work on writing your own letter to the editor of a newspaper.
It can feel as though the defining challenges of our modern era, such as racial and economic inequality and climate change, are problems that we cannot solve. We may feel like we, as individuals, don't possess the agency or power to make any headway in ensuring that this world is a better and more equitable place. We may be well intentioned but feel that we just can't do much to create real and lasting change. If we ever want to break this cycle, we will need to alter the way we think: We must recognize that we have agency and identify exactly where we can apply it in pursuit of change that is both meaningful and enduring. This course delves into how you can take part in this important shift in thinking by using tools of systems thinking and power analysis. You will examine how to map systems and perform power analyses to determine the sources of persistent racial, social, and economic inequities and injustices in your community. You will then perform a power analysis that will identify actors and institutions that are blocking change, bringing best practices and tools back to your communities to empower lasting change.
eCornell ILR543Leveraging Data for Social and Community Change0
Raw data requires further processing for it to become useful, valuable information. Although raw data has the potential to become "information," it requires selective extraction, organization, and sometimes analysis and formatting for presentation. This course introduces you to the processes by which data is analyzed and converted from raw resources into valuable information and knowledge. Data is crucial for equity, as it can be created, collected, used, and disseminated by organizations and social movements to advance equitable community change. In this course, you will have an opportunity to ask and write questions about a community's social, economic, and environmental conditions and how those conditions change over time. You will develop data-gathering techniques and determine where to find reliable data to answer research questions. You will identify data analysis techniques and ways that data are used in racial equity analyses, environmental impact statements, and other critical examinations of community conditions. Finally, you will use basic data analysis techniques to answer specific community research questions, directly equipping you with the necessary awareness and knowledge to build better communities through equitable change.
eCornell ILR544Designing Policies and Policy Change0
Public policy is a course of action created and enacted, typically by a government, in response to an issue or problem that requires attention. In this course, you will analyze the many forms of policy, and you will use tools to help identify both policy problems and potential solutions. In addition, you will consider tough questions about how our policies create and reinforce inequitable outcomes, and you will explore strategies for fighting back. Ultimately, you will design a policy change program to help enable a shift from inequitable to equitable development.
In this course, you will discover the importance of solidarity and collective action in equitable community change. More specifically, you will investigate the forces that intentionally seek to disempower ordinary people and undermine democracy. You will create a personal story for use in a larger public narrative that will be used to persuade members of a target audience toward collective action. Using the tools gained in this course, you can support your personal and community goals with awareness and best practices.
Perhaps you do not see yourself as a "researcher." In reality, however, we all perform some kind of research in our daily lives. Interestingly, the skills you use to navigate through day-to-day choices are the same basic skills you use in social action research projects that aim to define and propose solutions to collective problems. In this course, you will begin to perform social action research to inform community change efforts. More specifically, you will study what social action research is and how to formulate and execute a plan for your research. Finally, you will explore how to communicate the findings of your research to a target audience who can help you to create equitable social change in the communities you serve. You will also see examples of action research and effective research communications that you can apply in your own research projects.
eCornell ILR551Fundamentals of Organizational Design0
Organizations are so entrenched in our everyday lives that we often don't notice them. Each of us exists within a unique ecosystem of organizations that include where we work, shop, go to school, volunteer, acquire healthcare, and manage our personal and professional lives. Becoming aware of the ways that these organizations are structured and the choices behind these structures are fundamental skills necessary for organizational design. In this course, you'll analyze an organization in terms of how it is structured, what it does, and how it interacts within the larger ecosystem. You'll develop ways of thinking about these categories and the language you'll need to describe them, whether you are focusing on organizations in your immediate neighborhood or global organizations. Description is the first step. You will also develop the analytical skills to explain, from an organizational design perspective, why some organizations function more successfully than others so you can anticipate future changes that may create a need for redesign. Organizational design professionals use different models to assess organizations. In this course, you'll practice using the Congruence Model to assess whether an organization is well designed. By combining all the skills you develop in this course, you will be able to look critically at organizations to identify their key components, understand how they are related, and assess whether the organization would benefit from a redesign.
eCornell ILR552Assessing Organizations in Context0
An organization doesn't exist in a vacuum. In most cases, every organization is part of a larger industry, engaged in collaborative and competitive interactions with other organizations. Organizational designers rely on a common nomenclature to describe how organizations fit within their ecosystem. In this course, you'll take a look at the broader contexts the ecosystems in which organizations function. You'll articulate and analyze the different dimensions of this bigger picture. You'll also explore the various strategies that organizations tend to rely on for growth as well as the design implications of these strategic choices. The course brings together perspectives from different and complementary disciplines to provide a multifaceted approach which you will use to assess your own organization and where it fits within the larger context. Fundamentals of Organizational Design
Have you ever wondered why any organization you are affiliated with be it academic, nonprofit, governmental, or business is set up the way that it is? Chances are that decisions about how to structure your organization were made in the distant past, under conditions that no longer exist, in response to concerns that are no longer relevant. These choices make a difference in terms of how an organization works as well as how it feels to be a customer or an employee. In this course, you will take a look at the elements of formal structure how an organization is set up in order to achieve its goals. Looking through the organizational design lens, you will begin to evaluate how each structural decision impacts the overall organization. How does the work get done? How do employees communicate or fail to communicate? You'll dive down to the unit level to assess workplace challenges that may be the result of formal structural choices. Finally, you will have the opportunity to address workplace challenges using an objective, analytical approach and create alternative design proposals to address these challenges. Fundamentals of Organizational Design Assessing Organizations in Context
In times of change, organizational designers may respond by proposing modifications to the formal structure of an organization, perhaps by adding new divisions, changing the vertical hierarchy, or adopting alternatives to the traditional structures. While these are all methods of adjusting the formal structure of an organization, sometimes it is not feasible to make changes to the formal structure of an organization. In such cases, an organizational designer may choose to use policies, systems, practices, and culture to overcome the limitations of formal organizational structure. The proper adjustments to these powerful mechanisms can enhance organizational effectiveness and achieve desired outcomes by linking groups and activities. In this course, you will review research-based approaches to redesigning policies, systems, and practices to better manage your business and your workforce. You will consider which policies, systems, and practices to change and which to leave alone based on examples of real-world success and not-so-successful stories from companies around the globe. You'll also gain the skills you need to analyze organizations as social entities and consider ways you can use things like social capital, organizational culture, and informal groups to smooth the work functions. Finally, you will consider ways to combine and align these integration mechanisms policies, systems, practices, and culture to solve a specific organizational issue. You'll also look critically at some of the latest fads or trends in organizational design. Fundamentals of Organizational Design Assessing Organizations in Context Analyzing Formal Organizational Structure
Your talent pool represents all of the potential candidates you can hire for a job. As the first step of the hiring process, it is the first critical indicator of whether your hiring process is inclusive. A diverse talent pool is one that encompasses the many potential candidates on the market who could successfully apply for a particular role at your organization and mitigates areas of bias that often prevent marginalized candidates from joining and staying in the talent pool. Without a diverse talent pool, you cannot interview a diverse array of candidates and hire those candidates to create a more inclusive and representative workforce. By eliminating bias in the hiring process, your organization can build a diverse talent pool and create the foundation for inclusion, from recruitment all the way through to retention and success. In this course, you will establish what diversity and inclusion mean in relation to the hiring process and specifically how they connect to building diverse talent pools. You'll also evaluate your organization's sourcing methods for opportunities to establish more inclusive talent pipelines. You will then enhance your company's messaging to attract a diverse array of candidates and address sources of bias in the initial screening processes that your organization uses for early-stage job candidates. Finally, you'll explore different methods for measuring the effectiveness of your inclusion-based recruitment strategies. These methods will help you create an inclusion-centered approach to hiring that will broaden your talent pool and create more opportunities for your organization to hire candidates of marginalized identities and experiences. It is strongly encouraged for students to take this course first, unless they have a strong amount of hiring and DEI experience.
Candidate evaluation is the second stage of the hiring process. The evaluation stage allows your organization to determine which candidates from your diverse talent pool are the most qualified to meet the needs of an open position. During candidate evaluation, every step, from reviewing r sum s to conducting interviews and making selection decisions, offers an opportunity for inclusion. Yet each step within this stage of the hiring process also has pitfalls that can result in candidates of marginalized identities being excluded and impacting your organization's long-term inclusion goals. In this course, you will begin by examining how the candidate evaluation stage fits within an inclusive hiring approach, including the power of decision making in candidate selection. You will explore best practices for early-stage candidate evaluations and for interviewing candidates, and you'll evaluate the potential challenges of common approaches like pre-interview assessments and interviewing for "fit." You can use these best practices to make inclusive selection decisions that reduce bias and emphasize equity in candidate selection. Building Diverse Talent Pools
eCornell ILR563Promoting Inclusive Onboarding and Employee Success0
The hiring process does not stop at making a job offer. Onboarding and retention that lead to employee success make up the final stage of an inclusive hiring process. When you hire a new candidate, that candidate will be integrated within your organization through onboarding and hopefully grow over their time of employment. Candidates from marginalized backgrounds do not want to enter a new organization only to feel excluded immediately upon onboarding or to find themselves unable to advance. By providing candidates with inclusive onboarding measures and equitable, proactive opportunities for growth, you can maintain inclusion both within your hiring practices and within your organization as a whole. In this course, you will begin by reviewing the concept of employee integration and how it is impacted by onboarding and cultural inclusion. You will then determine the value of making inclusive offers to your candidates, including what equitable benefits and negotiation practices look like. You'll explore how to build an inclusive onboarding experience as well as how to sustain an employee's success beyond onboarding through internal hiring practices. Finally, you will revisit methods of tracking and monitoring DEI and inclusion progress over time to ensure that your organization recognizes the tangible benefits of an inclusive approach to hiring. Building Diverse Talent Pools Adopting Inclusive Hiring Practices
In this course, you will develop practical skills to effectively manage workplace conflicts by understanding their complexity, timing, and various dimensions. You'll distinguish between beneficial conflicts that drive innovation and damaging conflicts that harm organizational relationships, enabling you to make analytical assessments of conflict situations as they arise. Through self-assessment tools and case studies, you will identify your default conflict management styles and understand how others approach conflict differently, allowing you to adapt your approach when working with peers, supervisors, and clients. You'll utilize interest-based conflict resolution techniques that move beyond determining who is right or wrong to focus on understanding and addressing the underlying needs of all parties involved. This approach will enable you to transform potentially damaging conflicts into opportunities for organizational learning and growth while developing practical strategies to prevent unnecessary conflict escalation in your workplace.
