Jan Hanousek, Assistant Professor at the University of Memphis, became one of the first educators to use Blended Teaching for Financial Management. We sat down with him to understand how video content can be used in online Finance classes.
I'm an Assistant Professor at the University of Memphis. I teach ‘Financial Management,’ an introductory course that serves as a foundation for students pursuing a Finance degree.
The course covers a wide range of topics rather than focusing deeply on just one, providing an overview of important finance subjects, from issues in corporate finance to valuations, and even monetary policy.
The job of this class is to prepare students for a future education in Finance and give them the necessary foundational knowledge of Finance topics to understand the roles of the key roles and careers they can pursue within the field.
Finance is a broad topic, so we need to prepare them to understand the role of regulators, managers, investors, shareholders, and everyone in between.
Students come into the class without knowing much about Finance. The great part of this is you can show them interesting elements of Finance and get them excited about many different topics.
I’m often able to cover topics that my students might have read about in the media and are excited to learn more about. Things like insider trading scandals, and how stocks of major companies are valued. The class doesn’t deeply into any specific topics, so the class doesn't get stale.
The downside of teaching Financial Management is that many students come into the class having no idea about basic finance topics. It can be especially difficult if it has been some time since some students have had math classes, and now you are teaching them concepts like time value of money.
Blended teaching really helps with this by splitting the content into short videos, allowing students to learn at their own pace. If they don't understand something, they can replay the video as many times as they need to until it clicks.
The production quality is astonishing compared to anything that I would be able to do. The materials that accompany the video content is structured well. Students are given many resources, but they are not overwhelmed—they use what helps them and leave what doesn’t fit their learning style.
In particular, the practice quizzes are structured so that even students who may struggle can achieve good grades.
Assignments test the students in a different way - they require students to think critically and apply their knowledge. In my experience, that’s a difficult thing to do through regular textbooks.
This is my first time using Blended Teaching. I've incorporated all the materials in my class, and complimented it with some of my own materials, including some short videos I’ve recorded. I'm using the quizzes, assignments and discussions because I really like how they interplay with one another; the quizzes test the knowledge that students gain from watching the videos, the assignments test how well they can apply it, and the discussions give students an opportunity to explore the relevance of what they’ve learned to a real-world scenario.
An approach that’s worked well for me is using short introductions for each module, and then adding another video with something engaging; interesting stories, anecdotes, or something topical. Keeping these under five minutes is important!
It’s been far easier to incorporate than any other course that I have built previously. Traditional textbooks require a lot of busy work; putting things into Canvas takes a lot of time, and not every textbook will give it to you with a simple import/export system.
I really like that Blended Teaching is packaged in a way that’s easy to set up. Essentially, using Blended Teaching not only means thatI have videos with a much higher production value, but they’re also better constructed and come with quizzes that are tied directly to the videos.
In addition, the assignments and discussions build well on the core content. Not only am I able to give my students this great package of learning materials, but I can also get started using a fraction of my own time.
I'm able to effectively outsource some of the teaching of theoretical concepts that are more straightforward to cover and can only really be taught one way.
That allows me to focus on other aspects of the course that require more thought and time from me.
That gives me more time and energy to bring up the quality of the teaching in other aspects of the course.
This idea that students spend any meaningful time reading a textbook to the degree that it can be relied upon to help them understand the material as they work through a class is dying off, even in in person teaching.
Very few students go out and buy the textbook, and those that do don't really read through it. The result is that most student come into the classroom with little to no understanding of the topics and concepts being covered.
Students are much more naturally inclined to watch video content, and whereas with textbooks they don’t read what’s assigned to them, they do engage with the video content!
So far, I just have anecdotal evidence. The scores for the quizzes appear to be higher than before I was using Blended Teaching. I also received messages from students to tell me that they really like the content.
These points aside, the biggest indication of how well it's working is the fact that I'm teaching a section of the class which has many more students than we’d normally have in an online class. I'm teaching a class of 70 students. Typically like this class should be 40 to 50, so I'm essentially teaching two classes in one, and despite this, I get fewer messages from students asking me to clarify things, and the messages I am receiving this semester are typically regarding some announcements or post that I’ve made that’s unrelated to the teaching material.
.png){kind=small}