BSc (Hons) Business Computing (Systems Analysis)

In this module, subtitled ‘Everything is a Text’, you will consider the value of different types of texts and ways of imparting knowledge and ideas. You will reflect upon your identities as learners and future professionals in the world, considering a range of contexts: the academic/educational context, personal settings and the eco-systems that you live and work in. These reflections will be used to inform your practices as academic learners.

You will explore academic literacies, different ways of knowing and consider what counts as ‘legitimate’ knowledge. You will engage with critical thinking, making arguments and establishing criteria to defend intellectual positions and these skills will be acknowledged as social practices that produce and reinforce meaning and frameworks of understanding and knowledge.

Furthermore, you will engage with a wide range of academic and non-academic material, individuals and environments in order to contribute to discussions regarding attitudes and assumptions about ideas and experience, including within labour markets, cultural hegemonies, distributions of power and the relationship between the individual and society. In this way, the social interactions, relationships and contexts that underpin academic literacies in higher education will be made explicit.

You will discuss these ideas with students and tutors from the different subjects at Goldsmiths, and learn to be part of the wider university community. You will also be able to submit an assignment which could be a written, graphically designed, audio, video, or negotiated project. You will get to choose the assessment that best shows what you can do.

This module will introduce you to the fundamentals of programming and object orientation, including the following basic ideas of programming:

• variables
• memory and assignment statements
• control through conditional statements, loops
• functions and procedures
• objects and classes
• instance variables and methods
• arrays
• user interaction
• interaction between objects. 

This module gives a broad introduction to the creation of digital media and rich media websites and applications. It covers both the technical issues of programming with media, and the contextual topics of project management and designing applications to a particular commercial (or other) brief.

This module will introduce you to key theories, insights and methods within Organisational Studies. In particular, it will critically examine different organisational forms, processes and contexts.

The module places an important emphasis on the meaning and content of organisational strategies. It will help you develop the tools you need to analyse an organisation’s positioning within the marketplace, and think/plan strategically in order to make it more competitive.

You'll gain an understanding of strategic management and appreciate the interrelated dynamics of both strategic and organisational research and practice.

This module, subtitled ‘Researching Our World & Lives’, builds on the conceptual and contextual foundations of Identity, Agency and Environment 1.

You will learn how to conduct academic research and will be offered the opportunity to broaden and deepen your understanding of the relationship between your own interests, skills, values, career and non-career aspirations, the concepts, theories and contexts of your discipline, and the world.

You will reflect upon your identities as researchers, and learn how the research skills you’ve acquired both within your studies and the world more generally can be related to problem-solving in a wide range of contexts. You will consider your agency as researchers, what you can and cannot research, the ethical issues involved, and think reflexively about your position as a researcher in a range of environments and eco-systems.

Formal conventions of academic research and writing will be integrated into your individualised contexts and goals, enabling the expression of ideas and perspectives that may challenge the status quo. The module will encourage creativity, activism, decision-making and the formation of judgements leading to action-planning in relation to research topics and types of evidence, and professional planning.

You will learn to critique your own subject disciplines. Interdisciplinary sharing of knowledge will ensure that assessment and learning practices provide you with the opportunity to develop new lines of thinking and knowing, within formative collaborative learning and research communities.

This module is aimed at novice programmers who have learnt some basic programming techniques. The course builds on this knowledge by developing your ability to combine short segments of code to create larger projects. 

You'll begin by developing their knowledge of object-oriented programming through learning about principles such as encapsulation and abstraction. You'll be presented with existing code and designs which you'll explore, complete and debug. You'll build upon an example application in the development of a final project.

You'll be expected to engage in both the technical and social implications of your work, considering the applications applicability to a human context. This may include the ethical and cultural impact of software. 

During this work, you'll apply taught techniques in organising, planning and evaluating your code.  

This module  will provide you with a comprehensive overview of emerging strategies, up-to-the-minute technologies, and the latest market developments in the fields of Electronic Business in the Digital Era. You'll gain an understanding of the dynamics within this fast-paced industry, an appreciation of technological issues and the strategic business aspects of successful e-commerce.

This module aims to provide you with quantitative literacy skills to enable you to search out numerical information, understand it, critique it, reflect upon it, and apply it in making decisions. You'll explore the principles and concepts of statistics when applied to a wide range of activities and challenges in computing, particularly in business planning and user experience research contexts.

You'll be equipped with the quantitative skills necessary for them to interpret, analyse and communicate information derived from numerical data. You'll gain an understanding of how to present business numerical information in a variety of formats, and will introduce you to the tools necessary to present such information. The module theme is to look at numerical data in a variety of forms, to determine the ‘story’ that this data is telling and to tell that ‘story’ to others.  

Subjects covered by the module will include some or all of the following: 

• Data classification, tabulation and presentation 
• Measures of central tendency, disperson, skew 
• Probability, sampling, and distributions 
• Hypothesis testing 
• Correlation and regression 
• Time series and forecasting 

The subject knowledge in this module will be presented in a context relevant for business and/or computer science.

Our academic departments are developing exciting elective ideas to allow you to broaden your education, either to develop vocationally orientated experiences or to learn more about contemporary society, culture and politics. You’ll be able to choose safe in the knowledge that these modules have been designed for non-subject specialists and to bring students from different disciplines together. For example, you may want to take introductions to areas such as Law, Education, the digital industries, the creative industries,think like a designer or understand the history and politics behind our current affairs.

This module focuses on the technology underpinning client-server applications. This includes relational database systems, mainly from a development perspective, offering an introduction to data modelling and database implementation in SQL and alternatives such as No SQL The focus is on applications of relational and non-relational databases and techniques relevant to the creation of dynamic web applications such as form handling and templating. It includes practical work related to programming client-server web applications with a focus on principles and up to date practices.

This module will introduce you to the psychological theories and research on how organisational, team-level and individual characteristics affect productivity and mental health. This module will also consider the limitations of our understanding of these issues and how occupational psychology theory and research is trying to overcome them. 

This module will allow you to understand the concepts, skills, methodologies, techniques, tools, and perspectives essential for systems analysts to develop information systems. You'll learn aspects of the systems development life cycle, conceptual and systematic framework. To adapt to the changing environment for systems development, businesses methodologies will be taught and case studies analysed.

This module will give students the opportunity to experience group work, in the context of projects to specify, develop, deploy and evaluate a computer based system. This module will take students through the entire process, from requirements gathering, user-centred design, proposal development, implementation and evaluation. Students will also assess their outputs from the perspective of multiple roles within an organization, and consider the potential impact of their system on customers, users and society at large.

This module aims to provide you with an understanding of the need for computer security and the technologies that support it. It has both a theoretical component that will teach you mathematical underpinnings of security systems and a practical element that will help you discover the pitfalls of security design and to comprehend the mathematics underlying the protocols by programming small examples.

All aspects of our lives are increasingly being underpinned by a computational infrastructure of devices, networks and servers. This module will give you an overall understanding of these technologies and how they are used in practice. These include the components and functions of mobile and desktop operating systems, operating systems processes and scheduling, network architectures and protocols and serverside computation and cloud computing.

This module will position these technologies within the human and organizational context of their use and will culminate in a project in which you will design a computational infrastructure for a particular organisation or application.

Lots of students join Goldsmiths because they want to make a difference in society, to bring about positive change and develop skills and experiences which will allow them to access exciting careers. Goldsmiths’ Social Change module will allow you to do work on group projects with students from other departments to bring about change. You’ll be introduced to the UN’s Sustainable Development goals and core project management theories and practices allow you to work across a number of weeks towards a final Festival of Ideas where you’ll report work back to the academic and local community.

Final Project in Business Computing is an opportunity for you to apply the skills, knowledge and expertise that you have acquired whilst studying Business Computing to a single and coherent body of work. It will allow you to follow an initiative that appeals to you; the outcome will be the most substantial software that you have had to develop as part of your studies. Implemented systems may comprise a software application or a combination of hardware and software development. The project outcomes will serve as a showcase for your talents and could launch a professional career in industry.

You'll have to manage your own time and set regular objectives, undertaking project analysis, design, implementation and evaluation.

In this module, you'll learn about cutting-edge case studies that illustrate key problems confronting contemporary systems analysis. Set in familiar business environments, the set of cases provides useful insights into the experiences of systems analysts for classroom environments. 

You'll explore concepts, methods and tools from business management, computer science and industrial engineering are blended into one comprehensive and inter-disciplinary approach to understanding the role of the systems analyst.  

You'll analyse innovative and exciting cases that present common business scenarios, offering practical perspectives for up-and-coming systems analysts. 

You'll gain extensive knowledge of how to critically analyse business systems issues including opportunity recognition, business process re-engineering, systems management and organisational behaviour in relation to change management.

This module gives you a thorough understanding of the Digital Economy business environment and strategies firms employ to take advantage and counter forces present in that environment. Specifically, the module examines how digital technology helps reduce a variety of costs; explains different phenomena (e.g. network effects) present in the digital economy; emphasises the importance of platforms and ecosystems and analyses digitally enabled business models. Using theoretical advancements and practical cases the module builds critical skills necessary to manage businesses in the digital economy. 

This module will introduce you to the arguments that address the social and environmental context of management and its responsibilities to the organisation’s stakeholders.

Through examination of misdemeanour and irresponsibility, the module will focus on the key structural and individual drivers of social responsibility and sustainability and its manifestations. Addressing the instrumental and moral debates, it will employ both normative and descriptive perspectives, that are applied across workplaces in the public, private and third sectors.

Teaching and learning comprise a balance of theory and practice: we explore the purpose of business, applying ethical frameworks and stakeholder theory, plus, we examine the role of discretion and values. The module will expose you to regulatory/legal issues, the role of board directors and contemporary debates concerning sustainability.    

Your confidence will be developed using formative weekly discussions and learning from guest speakers. This will help you work towards the summative assessment.

This module aims to inspire and develop key skills related to your creative social and environmental entrepreneurship, or intrapreneurship, thereby enhancing your career prospects and employability.