by Laurie Pickard | Apr 26, 2014 | Thoughts on Higher Ed and Life
I believe that discovering what you’re naturally good at and finding ways to do more of it is the key to success and fulfillment. This is the premise behind an excellent book called Strengths Finder 2.0, a few years old now but still an inspiring read. At the same time, it’s sometimes worthwhile to push yourself to do those things that don’t come easily. If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time you will probably have surmised that I am a much better writer than I am a web developer. Having to design and manage a website is a necessary evil I’m willing to deal with in the name of getting my message out. Trying to make my site actually look good takes more design mojo than I’ve ever previously tried to muster. I’ve learned to make use of help forums, YouTube video tutorials, and the occasional support call to my web hosting company. Let me tell you, what these people call “help” sometimes feels like a cruel joke.
That said, developing a website has also been a surprisingly rewarding process. When I do buckle down and try to get a page or a post exactly right, I often get completely sucked in. Hours pass. I forget to eat. I enter a state of flow, which happens only when you’re doing something that is just difficult enough to require all of your attention, without being so far above your ability level that you give up.
Though I’m not naturally gifted in web development, I am improving. My confidence grows each time I’m able to solve (or work around) some intractable problem. Like trying to make a small image fill a slider. Or trying to match the color of my logo exactly to the color of my hyperlinks. (I think I got it pretty close!) I also believe there are probably some spiritual benefits to the practice of slowly getting better at something that doesn’t come easily. It teaches you patience, humility, resilience. Small triumphs feel monumental.
So why am I telling you this? Two reasons:
One, I revamped my Curriculum page today, and I’m so proud of it. Before, it was a static jpeg image taken from an excel spreadsheet. Now, it has links to all the courses I’ve taken, all the blog posts I’ve written about my specific courses, columns of different sizes, and even an image slider. I think it does a much better job of cataloguing my coursework, and I expect it will be a much more useful tool to anyone who visits my site and is interested in following my example. I encourage you to take a look.
Two, isn’t this analagous to the opportunity MOOCs present? The great thing about free courses is that they come with minimal risk. If you sign up for one and discover it’s too challenging, you haven’t lost anything. Which makes a MOOC the perfect forum to practice the discipline of being a beginner in a field that is unfamiliar. You might even discover an aptitude you didn’t know you had.
by Laurie Pickard | Apr 20, 2014 | MOOC MBA Design
These days you can find MOOCs on everything from Quantum Physics to Music Production and many other topics in between. But MOOCs don’t cover everything – at least not yet. Beyond the intro courses and the one-offs (Intro to Knitting Socks?), the options grow a bit more thin. Though I haven’t yet exhausted the available business courses – far from it – I anticipate a challenge when it comes to covering the more advanced topics that are part of a traditional MBA, as well as getting into greater depth on certain niche topics of particular interest for me.
One approach I have considered is to forget about the advanced stuff and just focus on the fundamentals. Honestly, how much do you remember from a degree program a few years out of school? If you have the basics and the overall approach down, most of the specifics of any given job you learn by actually doing that job. But while I do still plan to drill the fundamentals – perhaps more so than one would in a regular MBA – I have come up with some strategies that I think will allow me to go beyond first year coursework, even if I don’t find MOOCs to cover everything I want to learn.
- Web-based professional training
The web is full of training courses and materials geared toward a professional audience. Many come with a fee, but free resources are available as well. This strategy is especially helpful if you are looking to learn more about a specific niche field or technique. For example, I have recently become very interested in agricultural derivatives markets. Try as I might, I couldn’t find any MOOCs that covered the topic in depth (though Robert Shiller’s Financial Markets had a short unit on these markets). I did, however, come across a course from the World Bank designed for coffee traders, a self-study guide on hedging using futures and options from the CME Group (which runs the world’s largest derivatives exchange), and a series of video lectures from another trading platform – all meant for people who want to learn how to use derivatives for hedging commodity price risk. Score!
I’ve also found value in a series of webinars and other resources from the website AgriFin.org, which is meant to help practitioners working in access to finance, specifically in agriculture, to share knowledge.
These examples are specific to my interests in rural and agricultural development, but I expect similar resources exist for other fields.
- Re-creating the case study
One of the things I feel I’m missing as compared to a brick and mortar MBA is the case study approach. In many programs, students are asked to work on real world, out-of-the-classroom examples, sometimes working with real businesses that actually need their help. My plan is to find two to three real-world business projects in which to use my new skills over the course of my studies.
As a first step, I have signed up as the treasurer of the board for the American Employees Association at the US Embassy in Kigali, a job no one else was very keen to take on. To most people, keeping the books and generating financial statements for the organization that manages the embassy commissary probably just sounded like an additional headache, but to me, it sounded like a fantastic way to use exactly the skills I learned in Intro to Accounting.
- Community college and extension courses
Both community colleges and state universities, and sometimes even private universities, offer courses to the general public at minimal cost. If I were still in the US, I could have taken the University of Missouri’s course on trading agricultural derivitives, rather than using online resources. Many colleges, as well as chambers of commerce, offer community classes on topics like accounting, running a small business, budgeting, personal finance, and other similar subjects. One thing I like about such courses is that they are highly practical and skill-based.
- Read a book
If all else fails, I can always find books on the advanced topics that interest me. My hope is to find more interactive ways of learning throughout this course of study, but hey – whatever it takes.
by Laurie Pickard | Apr 12, 2014 | Courses, Platforms, and Profs
I’ve taken about a dozen business MOOCs so far as part of my effort to construct the equivalent of an MBA, for free. I’m always on the lookout for new courses, and I was excited when Coursera released “Financial Markets” with Nobel Prize-winning economist and Yale University professor Robert Shiller. I had previously come across another version of this course through Open Yale, a site run by Yale University where anyone can access no-frills video and audio of lectures that were delivered live in the classroom. I started the Open Yale lecture series but didn’t finish it because Coursera announced their version of the same course when I was only partway through. I generally prefer Coursera’s condensed, made-for-online format, so I stopped listening to the Open Yale lectures and signed up the Coursera version.
When I first got interested in MOOCs, I read several articles decrying MOOCs as furthering the phenomenon of “rock-star professors,” the idea being that big-name profs reduce the number of jobs available to lesser-known professors and diminish the quality of university teaching, since they typically teach to packed lecture halls where one-on-one interaction is practically impossible. Being an online student with no hope of actually speaking with my professors, I am excited about the idea that I might take a course from a renowned professor, even as one of thousands. Robert Shiller is about as renowned as they come. He basically predicted the 2008 financial crisis in his best-selling book Irrational Exuberance, and he won the Nobel Prize in Economics 2013, among many other career achievements.
Unfortunately, in its attempt to package Professor Shiller’s course for an online audience, Coursera missed an opportunity to use the MOOC format to surmount some of the obstacles inherent in teaching en masse. Instead, they managed to recreate many of the frustrations of a crowded lecture hall. Let me explain what I mean as we go through my three-part rubric for online courses.
Am I checking email during the video lectures?
This course passes the email test without a problem. Professor Shiller is clearly brilliant, the topics covered in the course are interesting and relevant, and the lectures are filled with history and anecdotes. However, the majority of the videos are the same lo-fi lectures I was watching on Open Yale, taken from when Professor Shiller taught this course in 2011. The sound quality isn’t great, the lighting is terrible, and the camera often pans away from the blackboard just as Professor Shiller finishes writing a formula. I often feel like a puny freshman in the back of the classroom, straining to see and hear what’s going on up front.
The best videos are the introductions to each week’s series of lectures, which Coursera produced specifically for this course. These videos are cheesy – each one features a different building on Yale’s illustrious campus – but the sound and lighting are good, and you don’t feel like an eavesdropper to a lecture that was made for someone else. These are also the videos in which Professor Shiller reflects on why, even with the bad image finance has acquired following the crisis, he still considers financial markets crucial to modern society.
Do the assignments require serious thinking?
The assignments for this course are composed of weekly quizzes and a peer-graded writing assignment. I was pleasantly surprised by the writing assignment, which required students to summarize an article about the psychological underpinnings of the financial crisis. The assignment was fairly rigorous, and peer grading worked better than I expected. It would have been even better if the peer graders had been able to provide written comments instead of just numerical scores, but that’s a minor complaint. The quizzes, however, are frustrating. They are certainly difficult enough, but they often test material that wasn’t adequately covered in class – for example, formulas that appear on the board for approximately 3 seconds before the camera follows Professor Shiller across the classroom and are never practiced. This is where Coursera was being lazy. Even if Professor Shiller himself was too busy to record new videos in which we could practice using these equations, surely one of the course’s three teaching assistants could have held a weekly section.
Is there a practical application for what I’ve learned?
I’ve mentioned before that I’m partial to courses that are short on theory and long on concrete skills. This course doesn’t exactly fall into that camp, but even though there isn’t a direct practical application for the material covered in “Financial Markets,” having an understanding of such markets is a necessary precondition for being an effective participant in them. This course will teach you what financial markets are, how they arose, and how they work today. Whether you are interested in using these markets, or just wants to have a better understanding of how they fit into our society, there is plenty of value to learning this material.
A missed opportunity
I think Coursera saw this course as a cash cow, an inexpensive way to turn pre-recorded lectures into a blockbuster MOOC featuring a star professor. They certainly built a lot of hype for the course; advertisements for it seemed to follow me around the web. But Coursera missed a chance to do more with the raw materials at its disposal. Any MOOC is a team effort. With Professor Shiller occupying the starring role, the rest of the team could have been called upon to flesh out the key concepts, just like in a live course where the big name professor is the draw and the TAs do the heavy lifting.
The bottom line
This course if definitely worth taking. Just don’t stress out about the math problems you can’t answer. Take this course to learn about the history and evolution of financial markets, to get a sense of the scope and purpose of these markets, to learn some terminology, and most importantly, to understand why an intellectual luminary like Robert Shiller thinks these markets are important to our society.
This post originally appeared on the website Poets and Quants.
by Laurie Pickard | Apr 6, 2014 | Thoughts on Higher Ed and Life
My focus in this semester is on finance and entrepreneurship. I started out strong with How to Build a Startup from Udacity. I also registered for several other courses, including Financial Markets with Robert Shiller (Coursera), Financial Analysis of Entrepreneurial Ideas (NovoEd), and An Introduction to Credit Risk Management (edX), as well as a few others. In registering for so many courses, I always thought I would drop some of them. I work full time, so I’m able to keep up with about two courses at a time.
One of the courses I signed up for as part of my finance and entrepreneurship unit – one I was actually quite excited about – was Evaluation Financière de l’Entreprise, a.k.a. Corporate Valuation, from the HEC business school in Paris (Coursera). As you might have guessed, this course was in French. Part of my interest in this course was the language element – I’ve studied French, I live in a formerly francophone African country, and I’m always looking for ways to improve my language skills.
But from the first week, it was clear that studying a difficult subject in a foreign language was going to require more time and energy than I typically budget for a MOOC. I spent the entire first video wondering what “action” the professor was referring to when he spoke about the “value per action” before realizing that “action” translates as “share.” I experienced a similar confusion with the word “bénéfice,” which translates not as “benefit” but as “earnings.” Unfortunately, by the time I had figured out that “benefit per action” was actually “earnings per share,” I had to go back and watch the whole lecture again.
The second week of the course, I went out of town over the weekend. Not having a large chunk of time that week to focus on my studies, I fell behind and I haven’t been able to catch back up. Even now that it has become abundantly clear that I won’t be able to finish the course, I haven’t been able to bring myself to un-enroll. Around 90% of MOOC enrollees don’t finish the courses they’ve signed up for. I’ve taken about a dozen MOOCs so far and this is the first one I’ve been unable to finish. Even though I didn’t intend to take all the courses I registered for, I’ve found it difficult to take the step of actually withdrawing from Evaluation Financière de l’Entreprise – I guess I don’t want to admit that I’m actually quitting, even if in practice I already have.
This experience has made it easier for me to understand why so many people don’t finish their courses. There is no cost at all to signing up, and registering for a course comes with a surge of hope and excitement about the new knowledge you’ll soon acquire. Giving up that prospect doesn’t feel good. Rather than subject oneself to the disappointment that comes with withdrawing from a course, it’s easier to let the course just time out. The fact that so many MOOC students are internationals, taking courses in their second or even third language, also helps to explain why the completion rates are so low.
My advice to other MOOC students at the beginning of this semester was to register for every course that strikes their fancy, then un-enroll from the ones they don’t plan to complete. Now that I’m actually in the position of knowing that I won’t be finishing one of my courses, I’ve found it difficult to take my own advice, but for the sake of consistency, I think I have to do it.
So here goes. Logging into Coursera. All right, Corporate Valuation, I’ll try to get back to you next time you’re offered.
Click.
<sigh>
It’s done.
