Master of Science in Organizational Development and Leadership

This course builds practical AI fluency for leaders who need to make informed decisions about adopting and overseeing AI in the workplace. Students learn core AI concepts (including machine learning and generative AI), common use cases, and the capabilities and limitations of AI tools. Emphasis is placed on interpreting AI outputs, asking the right questions of technical teams and vendors, and recognizing risks such as bias, hallucinations, privacy concerns, and security exposure. By the end of the course, students can evaluate AI proposals, communicate AI implications to stakeholders, and support responsible, value-driven adoption. 

This course focuses on leading teams and workflows where AI is embedded into daily operations, decision-making, and service delivery. Students examine how AI changes roles, work design, performance expectations, and accountability, and they develop approaches for change management, training, and adoption. Topics include human-in-the-loop process design, quality assurance for AI-assisted work, cross-functional collaboration between business and technical teams, and maintaining trust and transparency. Students leave prepared to implement AI-enabled processes that improve efficiency while preserving governance, employee engagement, and operational reliability. 

This course examines how organizations can use AI to drive innovation, differentiation, and sustainable competitive advantage. Students learn to identify high-impact AI opportunities, evaluate build-versus-buy decisions, and connect AI initiatives to business strategy, performance metrics, and customer value. The course emphasizes strategic portfolio planning, data readiness, experimentation and scaling, and measuring ROI while managing organizational risk. By the end of the course, students can develop an AI strategy roadmap that balances innovation with feasibility, governance, and long-term organizational capability building. 

This course introduces the leadership and organizational foundations of cybersecurity governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC). Students learn how to identify and prioritize cyber risks, align security strategy with business goals, and translate requirements into practical policies, standards, and controls. Emphasis is placed on risk assessment methods, control selection, third-party risk, audit readiness, and building governance structures that support accountability and resilience. By the end of the course, students can communicate risk to stakeholders and recommend compliance-aligned security improvements. 

Cloud, Networks, and System Security introduces students to the key ideas and practices used to protect cloud-based systems, computer networks, and organizational technology environments. Students learn how businesses safeguard information, manage user access, reduce security risks, and monitor systems for possible problems. The course also explores common security challenges, such as protecting data, preventing unauthorized access, and responding to potential weaknesses in technology systems. Through practical examples and activities, students learn how to recognize security concerns and recommend appropriate safeguards. By the end of the course, students will understand how organizations use layered security approaches to protect cloud services, networks, systems, and sensitive information. 

This course focuses on how organizations detect, respond to, and recover from cybersecurity threats through effective security operations. Students examine the functions of a Security Operations Center (SOC), incident response lifecycle, threat detection strategies, and the use of logs, alerts, and telemetry to investigate suspicious activity. The course emphasizes operational playbooks, escalation and communication procedures, evidence handling, and continuous improvement through lessons learned. Students gain the ability to design and evaluate operational workflows that support timely response and measurable security outcomes. 

This course surveys the legal and regulatory environment that shapes cybersecurity decision-making and organizational liability. Students analyze privacy and security laws, breach notification obligations, contracts and third-party responsibilities, intellectual property considerations, and the legal dimensions of incident response and investigations. Through scenario-based learning, students practice applying legal concepts to real-world cyber events, including reporting, documentation, and stakeholder communication. The course prepares students to collaborate effectively with legal counsel and leadership while making security decisions that reduce legal exposure. 

This course explores psychological, social, cultural, and environmental influences on physical activity behavior, with emphasis on evidence-based behavior-change theories and intervention strategies. Students critically evaluate approaches used to improve participation, adherence, and sustainability across diverse populations and settings. Coursework emphasizes program planning, equity, stakeholder communication, and the application of behavior-change science to real-world leadership and implementation challenges.  

This course examines epidemiologic methods, surveillance systems, and population-level evidence linking physical activity to health promotion, disease prevention, and quality of life. Students analyze and interpret research findings, examine trends in physical activity and health outcomes, and apply epidemiologic evidence to inform policy, programming, and organizational decision-making. Emphasis is placed on translating population health evidence into strategic action and measurable practice. 

This course introduces graduate-level quantitative reasoning, research design, and ethical principles relevant to exercise science and human-centered program evaluation. Students examine descriptive and inferential statistics, interpretation of results, research quality, and ethical issues related to human participants, equity, data stewardship, and professional responsibility. Emphasis is placed on using sound methods and ethical judgment to design, evaluate, and communicate applied research and capstone projects that address real-world problems.  

Healthcare organizations are among the most structurally complex institutions in the country, and leaders who do not understand how they are built cannot effectively change them. This course gives students a working knowledge of how healthcare services are organized and delivered across hospitals, physician practices, long-term care facilities, public health agencies, and payer organizations, applying organizational development frameworks to help students develop the systems-level thinking that senior roles in healthcare require. Students leave with a clear picture of the environment they are leading in and begin the topic proposal and organizational analysis that anchors their Capstone Research Project. 

Financial decisions in healthcare are leadership decisions, and this course develops the ability to make them well. Students work with the financial tools and frameworks healthcare leaders rely on, including budget structures, reimbursement systems, cost and revenue analysis, and capital planning, learning to interpret them through a leadership lens and connect financial performance directly to quality outcomes. Students also advance their Capstone Research Project by developing the financial and operational analysis section tied to the organization they identified in HCA 500.

Healthcare leaders operate within a web of regulatory requirements, legal obligations, policy pressures, and ethical responsibilities that can shift with little warning, and this course prepares students to navigate that environment with sound judgment. Students examine the major legal and regulatory frameworks governing healthcare organizations, work through real-world ethical dilemmas, and develop the kind of leadership judgment needed when the right answer is not obvious, and the stakes are high. Students complete the course by developing the policy, legal, and ethics analysis section of their Capstone Research Project, building directly on the work completed in HCA 500 and HCA 510.  

Students enter this course with an organizational analysis, a financial case, and a policy and ethics framework already in place, and bring all that work to completion through a fully developed Capstone Research Project centered on a real quality improvement challenge within a healthcare organization. The course focuses on performance measurement, patient safety frameworks, error reduction, and system-level approaches to reducing variation in care, equipping students to identify a meaningful QI problem, build the evidence base for addressing it, and communicate their findings in a formal leadership document. The capstone demonstrates that a student can integrate systems thinking, financial reasoning, policy awareness, and quality improvement leadership into a single, coherent work product, and reflects the kind of thinking that distinguishes a capable manager from an effective organizational leader. 

The HR function itself is an organizational system that can be designed well or poorly, and the leaders who design it well are the ones who treat HR as a strategic partner to the business rather than an administrative function reporting to it. This course examines how organizations structure their HR function, including centralized versus decentralized models, the HR business partner model, centers of excellence, shared services, and outsourcing decisions, and how those structures shape the function's ability to deliver strategic value across geographic and cultural contexts. Students apply strategic and diagnostic frameworks to assess HR function maturity and operating model fit, evaluate HR's role as a strategic business partner, examine the design choices required to manage a global or multi-jurisdictional workforce, and analyze how inclusive infrastructure is built into the HR function from the ground up rather than added as an afterthought. Students complete the course with an HR Function Analysis of an organization of their choice that becomes one of three foundation deliverables they integrate into their Strategic HR Plan in HRL 530.  

HR leaders who cannot speak the language of workforce data, total rewards, or employee relations lose credibility quickly with executives, finance partners, and union representatives. This course develops the analytical and operational fluency required to manage these connected systems at the leadership level, focusing on the HR function's analytics infrastructure, rewards architecture, and approach to employee and labor relations. Students learn to read and interpret organizational workforce metrics including turnover, time-to-fill, internal mobility, compa-ratio, and pay equity, design total rewards frameworks that align compensation philosophy, pay structure, benefits, and recognition with organizational strategy, and address the employee and labor relations work that touches both data and rewards, including grievance procedures, collective bargaining considerations, and the use of workforce analytics to identify and address equity gaps. Students apply the analysis to a workforce challenge in their chosen organization and complete the course with a Workforce Analytics, Total Rewards, and Relations Analysis. This analysis becomes one of three foundation deliverables they integrate into their Strategic HR Plan in HRL 530.  

The hardest decisions in HR happen at the intersection of legal compliance, organizational risk, corporate responsibility, and business pressure, and the leaders who make them well understand each pressure deeply enough to know when each should win. This course examines the federal employment law framework governing the workplace, including Title VII, the ADA, the ADEA, the FMLA, the FLSA, and the NLRA, with attention to state-level variation and the ethical responsibilities of HR leaders during investigations, terminations, accommodations, and organizational change. Students also examine HR risk management as a discipline, including how organizations identify and mitigate workforce-related legal, operational, and reputational risk, and how corporate social responsibility commitments shape HR practice in areas including community engagement, sustainability reporting, and workforce equity. Students develop the leadership judgment required when the right answer is not obvious and the stakes are high, and complete the course with a Legal, Risk, and Responsibility Analysis of a workforce challenge in their chosen organization. This analysis becomes one of three foundation deliverables they integrate into their Strategic HR Plan in HRL 530.  

Students enter this course with three completed analyses from HRL 500, HRL 510, and HRL 520, all built on the same organization. The capstone integrates those three into a Strategic HR Plan, a deliverable that extends beyond the project plan and recommendation produced in the program capstone (ODL 570). The Strategic HR Plan includes a workforce strategy with quantified ROI projections, an execution playbook covering timeline, milestones, resource requirements, barrier analysis, and mitigation strategies, an inclusive culture strategy that addresses how the recommended changes cultivate and sustain an inclusive workforce, a stakeholder engagement framework, and board-ready briefing materials. The course focuses on strategy formulation, execution design, strategic workforce planning, and executive communication. Specialty students must use a different organizational context or workforce challenge in HRL 530 than the one used in ODL 570, ensuring the two capstones produce distinct work products.  

This course introduces contemporary organizational development concepts and techniques. Leaders and change agents draw upon them to evolve their organizations in response to macro trends and marketplace dynamics. The course addresses the human aspect of OD including issues and practices in high performance teams, talent management, change and conflict management, and target audiences. Issues of organizational agility, structure, assessment, and measurements round out the OD leader tool kit. 

Effective leaders must have the ability to drive change while building resiliency into the organization. This course will explore the practical application of foundational change models within the contemporary organization. The course explores the interplay of engaged leadership, active resource planning, and effective people and conflict management to ensure the organization can respond rapidly to changing dynamics and emerging threats with agility.    

The most valuable resource within any organization is human talent and capability. This course explores the macro trends in the competition for talent and the evolving composition and needs of the workforce. Learners will apply concepts focused on talent acquisition techniques, the employee lifecycle, and applied andragogy to attract, retain and develop an effective, engaged, and satisfied workforce able to meet the evolving needs of the organization.

Optimal team and organizational performance require strategic and tactical goal alignment throughout and across the organization as well as an effective methodology for ongoing communication focused on expectations, goal attainment and accomplishment. This course explores contemporary performance management concepts, systems and practices which foster performance excellence and employee development. The course also explores inherent legal, ethical and outcome risks associated with performance management.

Leadership theories and practices is an ever-evolving field. This course will explore and contrast key seminal leadership theories and models, their strengths, and limits as well as their practical applications.  Learners will delve into the different leadership styles and situational leadership practices and evaluate their own leadership patterns and preferences. Variations in leadership expectations and styles across global regions round out the learn experience.  

This course offers learners the opportunity to apply their knowledge of leadership theories into organizational practices through a scenario-based approach.  Students will address the responsibilities and dilemmas fundamental to leadership while they navigate the leadership scenario project and assignments. This course will instill the practice of critical thinking and research to support decision making.

A fundamental role of leadership is developing and engendering a vibrant company culture by reinforcing core values through various communication methods. This course introduces learners to the modern methods used for leadership communication, including company communication systems, video, written word, and social media. Learners will have the opportunity to practice these skills across multiple communication mediums.

Leaders have the fundamental responsibility to motivate their teams and the entire organization. This course explores modern coaching and mentorship concepts and practices leaders draw upon to bring out the best in others. Learners will have the opportunity to practice coaching under various scenarios expanding their leadership tool kit. 

This course introduces students to action research as a practical approach for understanding and improving problems within professional settings. Students learn to identify and analyze organizational challenges, examine relevant research and evidence, evaluate potential interventions, and develop a structured action research proposal. Through a series of scaffolded assignments, learners design an evidence-informed improvement plan that incorporates implementation, evaluation, and adaptation strategies in preparation for the capstone experience. 

This course serves as the culminating experience of the master's program. Students synthesize learning from across their graduate studies, examine the development of their professional identity, apply disciplinary frameworks to complex situations, evaluate professional decisions under conditions of uncertainty, and demonstrate readiness for advanced professional practice. Through the creation of a professional portfolio and defense, learners integrate evidence, reflection, professional judgment, and future goals into a comprehensive demonstration of graduate-level achievement.