In the winter quarter I will be teaching a lecture-based course on the theory of finance. It has three main elements:
- The principle of diversification, culminating in the Capital Asset Pricing Model
- The principle of hedging, culminating in the Black-Scholes option pricing formula
- Markets with asymmetric information, with implications for financing, payout, and governance
I last taught the course 5 years ago, teaching exclusively a senior seminar in the intervening years. I'm dreading going back into a lecture hall, as opposed to a seminar room. My sentiments are best summed up with this quote, from a piece by mathematics professor Jerry Uhl of the University of Illinois:
One of the first to note that the lecture system needed to be replaced was Ralph Boas in 1980 : "As a means of instruction, lectures ought to have become obsolete when the printing press was invented. We had a second chance when the Xerox machine was invented, but we muffed it."
The whole article, "How Technology Influenced Me to Stop Lecturing and Start Teaching," is worth a read. And "technology" here doesn't mean replacing yellowed lecture notes with pre-fabricated powerpoint slides. The classroom experience should be active, not passive, and economics as a discipline ought to be taught more as a lab and less as a lecture. I'd be receptive to any pointers to innovative classroom methods or materials.