Excellence in Teaching interview series: Vitali Alexeev
For the first interview in the Excellence in Teaching series, we asked Dr Vitali Alexeev about the Teaching Merit Certificate application process, and the unit he was awarded the certificate for.
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Vitali, congratulations on receiving a Teaching Merit Certificate. I understand that you were nominated for the award by some of your students? | |
A |
Yes, that’s right. The unit that I was teaching was BEA286 Investment Analysis. It is one of the units that I am most passionate about so I was very happy to have been nominated by my students. I was contacted by email and told that I had been nominated. After that, it was a matter of completing a form where I had to describe what occurred in the unit and why I felt I deserved the certificate. I think the process was pretty straightforward. | |
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Tell us some more about BEA286. | |
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There’s a lot going on in this unit! The focus is on building skills that will help students be employment-ready, so the application of investment analysis skills is quite important. Every year we have to fill out the unit reports and every year I teach the unit I have fewer issues or negative things to say about it, so I know that I’m on the right track. | |
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Describe the student cohorts that you teach in BEA286. | |
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We have students studying face to face in Hobart as well as students studying by distance. Many of our distance students live locally, but study by distance due to work commitments. Others are based on the Launceston and Burnie campuses, and a small portion are based on mainland Australia or overseas. Our cohort is quite diverse. Some of our students are international , and some have no background in finance at all. Many of our students come from different disciplines like engineering and social sciences, so they come to the unit with a very limited understanding of financial theory and terminology. In addition to this we have a combination of undergraduate and graduate student enrolments. | |
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It must be challenging dealing with diverse cohorts. What steps did you take to deal with these challenges? | |
A |
One of the major challenges we face is that some of our students haven’t been exposed to finance topics in their undergraduate studies. Students who have studied finance are generally aware of terminology like ‘equity’. How do you explain what ‘equity’ is to a student who has never heard of it before?For the students who don’t have a finance background, I offer three workshops. These workshops are tailored to address finance knowledge gaps so that the students have the ability to perform the first assessment task effectively. We also cover financial mathematics and stats in Microsoft Excel, for example, regression analysis, and option pricing. Many of our students are familiar with the basics of Excel, but have never had to use it to perform complex calculations. In the future I would like to develop a series of short videos on specific topics, which students can review in their own time if they need to.
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Q |
You mentioned that this unit is very focused on the application of investment analysis skills. How is this manifested in the unit’s activities and assessments? |
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A |
The unit is designed around a portfolio simulation for a hypothetical client of their making. Students submit two portfolio reports, in addition to delivering a poster presentation. They are encouraged to work in groups as I believe that discussing initiatives together will help them work it out better than if they were to work alone. Report writing is a skill that they will need in the workforce, so we generally get them to write in a report style.The first portfolio report is basically a description of the client, the objectives the portfolio needs to achieve and any constraints on the client’s portfolio, for example, tax incentives and whether or not the client wishes to invest in environmentally sustainable companies. I’m trying to make this as real as possible for the students, because text books often talk about returns on investment without covering important things like tax implications for the client. Students are invited to select a minimum of six securities for their portfolio, but they are welcome to experiment with larger number of stocks in their portfolios. Doing this teaches them about the importance of diversification – that investing in just one or two securities is a risky approach. They quickly learn that they can diversify some of the risks by investing across industries or by investing in companies of different sizes.
Students work on the second portfolio report towards the end of the unit. This report is focused on analysing the performance of their portfolio. Students use Excel together with the DataStream database to analyse and mine financial data. This way, students gain experience working with data as they would in the real world and they can include this experience on their resumes.
The students are given the chance to present their portfolios to the class during a poster presentation session. The group members stand by their poster, ready to defend their results if there are any questions. They’re free to walk around and look at their peers’ presentations. I thought it would be fair if the students decided how grades would be awarded for the poster session, so they each pick their three best presentations. The marks are issued according to the votes received. I do reserve the right to adjust the grades as needed, but only by 1 point or so.
The presentations have several benefits. Firstly, the presentation is an important milestone that encourages students to start working on their portfolio early, rather than waiting to the last minute. Secondly, the presentations were delivered 2 weeks prior to the final portfolio submission date, meaning that students could use feedback from their peers and me to improve their final submission. Finally, the presentations require students to explain their portfolios and convince others that theirs was the best portfolio available. These are skills that they will need to compete in the financial industry.
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Q |
Group work and the presentation session are a key component of the unit. How did you cater for your distance students who perhaps couldn’t attend workshops or the poster session? | |
A |
Because we had a blended cohort, it was important to have an online presence so online discussions were strongly encouraged. Many of my distance students were concentrated in Launceston, so they were able to meet in person. But technologies like Skype allowed others to have face to face interactions over the internet. They could see the expressions on each other’s faces. This kind of technology alleviates the problem, but doesn’t eliminate it.Presentations for distance students were done using voice-overs in PowerPoint. They were made available online so that distance and face to face students could review them. This way, all students had the opportunity to review the presentations made by others, and receive feedback on their own presentations. Many of our distance students even attended the face to face poster presentation session, so attendance was huge! |
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