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
Target audience:
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:
- Why it pays to increase your financial wordpower
- Capital and capitalism
- Assets, liabilities, net worth and equity
- Interest and financial returns
- Risk and financial risk
- Next steps, including personal actions arising and accountability for doing them
Schedule:
Orientation week
Purpose/Learning outcomes: By studying this week the students should have:
- Become familiar with navigating around the VLE and from VLE to links and back
- Tested their ability to access files and the web conferencing software and sorted out any problems with the help of the eLearning Helpdesk
- Learnt how to look for, assess and reference internet resources
- Used forums to introduce themselves to other students
- Contributed to a discussion forum to introduce themselves to other students and discuss why they are interested in the course, what they hope to get out their studies, and also to respond to any News items sent out on behalf of tutor
Teaching Weeks
Week 1 Why it pays to increase your financial wordpower
Purpose: To 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. By studying this week the students should have:
- Appreciated the fundamental importance of identifying and defining financial concepts.
- Recognised that many common words have specialised meanings in finance.
- Recognised that financial terms may mean different things in different contexts
- Identified and explained relevant examples.
- Created an appropriate expandable personal register of the concepts they are learning, concise definitions, and notes of their significance for their own professional work or personal finances.
Week 2 Capital and capitalism
Purpose: To 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. By studying this week the students should have:
- Appreciated the meaning and importance of capital.
- Explained why capitalism considers that the providers of capital are entitled to benefits.
- Identified and explained relevant examples.
- Added these and related concepts to their personal register of financial concepts, including the significance for their own work or personal finances, or both.
Week 3 Assets, liabilities, net worth and equity
Purpose: To 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. By studying this week the students should have:
- Understood the meaning and importance of assets and liabilities, including financial assets and liabilities.
- Appreciated that every financial asset is also a financial liability, and why this is so important.
- Identified the meaning and importance of net worth and equity, the relationship between each of them, and their relationship with assets and liabilities
- Produced and explained relevant examples.
- Added these concepts to their personal register with the significance for their own work or personal finances, or both.
- Identified a maximum of three personal action points from their work on the course to date, and noted them in their personal register, together with targeted completion dates.
Week 4 Interest and financial returns
Purpose: To gain comfort and confidence about interest and rates of return, including simple calculations and qualitative appreciation of directions of influence in more complex situations. By studying this week the students should have:
- Appreciated the meaning and importance of interest, rates of interest, return and rates of return, including the relationships between these important concepts.
- Successfully undertaken simple calculations of interest and return.
- Understood the significance of compound interest and return.
- Appreciated how rates of return can be calculated from forecast and historic cash flows and their timing.
- Added these and related concepts to their register of financial concepts, including their personal significance.
Week 5 Risk and financial risk
Purpose: To 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. By studying this week the students should have:
- Understood the meaning and importance of risk and financial risk, and the relationship between them.
- Appreciated the relationship between risk and expected financial returns.
- Chosen appropriately between simplified case study alternative investments.
- Understood the potential benefits of diversification, and also its limitations.
- Added these concepts to their register with their personal significance.
- Identified a maximum of three additional personal action points from their work on the course to date, and noted them in their personal register, together with target completion dates and an accountability process.
Feedback week
Purpose:
- Assessment of student learning, including optional personal action plans and accountability process
- Assessment of student satisfaction
- Encouragement of further study
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.”
