hey everybody this is Brad Jordan and
you may know me from such hit says fundamentals of corporate finance by
Ross Westerfield and Jordan
essential corporate finance by Ross Westerfield and Jordan and a few other
titles the reason I wanted to chat with you today
is my co-authors and I have been working for several years
to develop something that we're very excited about we think we're finally
solve the problem
that's been plaguing finance professors since the beginning of time
my problem has to do with Excel I think we would all agreed would like for students
to have better Excel skills
but the problem is that students coming into my classes at least
have wildly different backgrounds and so to do anything with
Excel I end up spending a lot of time teaching Excel to not really what I
want to be doing
the second problem we run into or at least I run into a lot
is that Excel is of course very open-ended
so when we give assignments to students they can get fairly free-spirited
in how they respond to those assignments that makes grading an absolute
nightmare
the third problem I faced at least is that some of our classes get as big as 500
students
so between the fact students need a lot of extra help with Excel
they need help with the finance aspect of the problem and then finally the grading
nightmare
is just not practical for us to do anything like the level of Excel
that we would like to do but I think we have a solution after a lot of
development
we've come up with a feature that is embedded in our from finance Connect product
that lets instructors assign Excel problems just like any other problem in Connect and the
beauty of it is of course
that it auto graded so kind of in one swoop
we fixed everything we needed to fix in fact embedded in the Excel assignments
there is extensive Help available for students so after them knocking on your
door
the moment you give this I assignment you can just allow them to have access to hints
or you can allow them have access to the complete solution to the problem if you
choose
the way we were able to get all this done
and make it work is that what the student sees when you select the
the Connect problem is a very detailed Excel simulation
by using a simulation we have complete control over what the
season how the Excel behaves in every aspect of the problem
so let me show you one of the question looks like for a student
so the first thing you'll notice is that
this is an ultra-realistic html5 Rendering of Excel
Students can interact with all the menus and tools like to be able to live Excel
so students love this they really can't tell the difference between what they're seeing
inside of our simulation and what they see when they use Excel
outside for simulation students are then given steps to complete
the yellow cells are graded and the student enters the correct formula the cell
populates is automatically move to the next cell
but again a very valuable feature of this is when
struggling with how to answer after like we're doing here
then they can click either hint or show me
students now get help solving the problem and the level the help is up to
you the instructor
in cell d21 type equals FB
open parenthesis c12 divided by 12
comma c14 multiplied by 12
comma negative c10 close parenthesis
and then press ENTER
in cell d23 type equals FB
opened
s c13 divided by 12 comma
c14 multiplied by 12 comma
negative c11 close parenthesis and then press ENTER
if you want there's complete step-by-step
tutorials and complete solutions in corporated into and every
Excel Sim so this new type of question we think solves this problem
how can we improve our Students Excel skills without creating
all sorts of support and grading problems for us as instructors
we think this is a major step forward in finance pedagogy
and I hope you have a chance to experiment with it and give us some
feedback but I think you're gonna like it
if you need any more information or a live demonstration
please contact your local sales representative