Aims of the course:
- Raise students’ financial awareness, confidence and skills
- Enable students to engage more successfully with finance specialists
- Support students considering a career or secondment in finance
This course is for you if you answer yes to any one of these questions:
- Would your personal finances benefit from more understanding and attention?
- Do you interact with financial specialists, but not always fully understand them?
- Are you considering a career or secondment in finance?
No prior knowledge is required or assumed.
Learning outcomes:
As a result of the course, within the constraints of the time available, students should be able to:
- Improve their personal financial situation by applying selected insights from the course
- Enjoy greatly improved interactions with financial specialists
- Determine whether a secondment or career in finance is appropriate for them
Course content overview:
Teaching Week 1: Why it pays to increase your financial wordpower
Gain a sound appreciation of the importance of the specialist language of finance and the need to translate it into practical and jargon-free insights. Create a dynamic personal system to record, link, apply and expand this broadening and deepening understanding.
Teaching Week 2: Capital and capitalism
Grasp the fundamental importance of capital as a factor of production, and the role and legitimate perspectives of the providers of capital in the economy and society.
Teaching Week 3: Assets, liabilities, net worth and equity
Develop a sound understanding of why all financial assets for one person are also financial liabilities for another, and connect this essential insight with the important financial concepts of net worth and equity.
Teaching Week 4: Interest and financial returns
Gain comfort and confidence about interest and rates of return, including simple calculations and qualitative appreciation of directions of influence in more complex situations.
Teaching Week 5: Risk and financial risk
Introduce the fundamentally important concept of financial risk, connect it with general and personal insights from Weeks 1 to 4 of the course, and identify key personal action points.
Schedule (this course is completed entirely online):
Orientation Week: 7-13 September 2020
Teaching Weeks: 14 September-18 October 2020
Feedback Week: 19-25 October 2020
Each week of an online course is roughly equivalent to 2-3 hours of classroom time. On top of this, participants should expect to spend roughly 2-3 hours on other recommended activities and exercises, although this will vary from person to person.
While they have a specific start and end date and will follow a weekly schedule (for example, week 1 will cover topic A, week 2 will cover topic B), our tutor-led online courses are designed to be flexible and as such would normally not require participants to be online for a specific day of the week or time of the day (although some tutors may try to schedule times where participants can be online together for web seminars, which will be recorded so that those who are unable to be online at certain times are able to access material).
Unless otherwise stated, all course material will be posted on the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) so that they can be accessed at any time throughout the duration of the course and interaction with your tutor and fellow participants will take place in a variety of different ways which will allow for both synchronous and asynchronous learning (discussion boards,etc).
A Certificate of Participation will be awarded to participants who contribute constructively to weekly discussions and exercises/assignments for the duration of the course.
What our students say
“I ended up learning far more than I expected.”
“Breaks down difficult concepts into digestible and relatable terms while encouraging ongoing dialogue among all enrolled. This made for some very enlightening conversations as there were people enrolled from five of the six inhabited continents!”
“The way Doug asks counter-questions to stimulate your own thinking so that you arrive at the answers yourself, without being told, was key to me finally understanding several concepts in finance that I had been struggling with.”
