Revitalizing plenary finance lectures

Abstract

Knowledge cannot necessarily be easily transferred from a lecturer to students. It needs to be constructed by the learners themselves. If a learner is active and allowed to directly apply abstract knowledge to concrete cases in a lecture, the learning process will improve. In aiming to improve learning outcomes for plenary lectures, we present new topics through examples from a Bachelor’s degree course in finance. An example involves a problem and the procedure for solving it. The lecturer and the students develop the examples simultaneously on separate PCs.While the teacher demonstrates the examples on a spreadsheet on a large screen, the students model the examples in separate spreadsheets on PCs they have brought along.When the example requires, the lecturer introduces new concepts and principles.We can encode the general principles behind the problem solution when the example is complete. An evaluation reveals that students perceive it as instructive to work on examples in spreadsheets in plenary finance lectures.