Hello,
Here is the link of few sample learning activities which I use in my courses to keep my students engaged. Discussions on online forum about these activities are usually extensive and address the issue of social presence in online teaching environment.
https://zraja.trubox.ca/category/learning-activities-portfolio/
Price Ratio Analysis is widely used in the investment industry to find the price of stocks. I provide my students with Value Line Investment Surveys of sample firms so that they can apply the price ratio analysis to evaluate the price of stocks of real firms. Kindly click on the following link to get the Value Line Investment report of Walmart.
Walmart’s Value Line Investment Report
After downloading such reports, students need to use the data from the report and create an excel sheet similar to the following one. This excel sheet will have the range of possible prices for firm’s stock.
Excel file for conducting Price Ratio Analysis
Now this activity makes my students really excited as they can apply their knowledge, learned in the course, to solve the real world situation. Hence, it keeps them engaged and help me to attain one of the important learning outcome of my course.
By: Dr. Zubair Ali Raja
In my Corporate Finance and Financial Statement Analysis Classes, group of 4 students need to analyze a company. To ensure a sound analysis, I always ask them to find out the answers to the following questions, as first assignment, so that they know the nature of firm’s business, background, capabilities, competitive advantage and its industry. This keeps them engaged right from the start and confirms that learning outcomes will be attained. Also, I open a discussion forum related to this assignment where we talk about few sample companies like Apple, Intel, Walmart, Lululemon, Costco etc. This allows my students to understand how they need to answer the questions of this assignment which are given below.
Q1: What is the business, the products, the customers, what is the recent historic economic performance, what are the recent strategic decisions taken the company?
Q2: What are the key success factors and risks associated with the firm’s chosen competitive strategy?
Q3: Does the firm currently have the resources and capabilities to deal with the key success factors and risks?
Q4: Has the firm made irreversible commitments to bridge the gap between its current capabilities and the requirements to achieve its competitive advantage?
Q5: Has the firm structure its activities (such as research and development, design, manufacturing, marketing and distribution and support activities) in a way that is consistent with its competitive strategy?
Q6: Is the company’s competitive advantage sustainable? Are there any barriers that make imitation of the firm’s strategy difficult?
Q 7: Are there any potential changes in the firm’s industry structure (such as new economic conditions, new technologies, foreign competition, changes in regulation, change in customer requirements) that might dispute the firm’s competitive advantage? Is the company flexible enough to address the change?
Students can find the answers of these questions from the quarterly (10-Q) and annual (10-K) reports submitted by the firm to security and exchange commission (SEC) which is also publicly available on SEC’s website. American firms’ statements can be accessed on www.sec.gov and Canadian firms’ financial reports are available on www.sedar.com
Now this activity provides hand on experience to my students that how publicly available information or data can be utilized to understand the company and subsequently conduct good analysis to gauge the financial health of the firm. Therefore, such activity is in line with my teaching philosophy which help students to practically engage in the course using free of cost data available to everyone.
By: Dr. Zubair Ali Raja
In my class of Advance Corporate Finance, student needs to do exercise problems for each chapter. These problems are available at the following link and students need to use the code given to them by the publisher to access these problems.
https://connect.mheducation.com/class/z-raja-summer-2020
This is an important learning activity as students practice their finance skills taught to them in each chapter by solving these questions. For my students of corporate finance, free resources are also available in the Thompson Rivers University Moodle shell, prepared by Professor Dan Thompson, under the heading of “Open Educational Resource: Business Finance” and given at the following link: https://moodle.tru.ca/course/view.php?id=10042
Providing these interactive problem-solving opportunities are in line with my teaching philosophy as I champion the teaching approach which let my student master finance skills by solving challenging questions. In future, as advised by the “Engage” course, I am determined to open up the discussion on the most challenging question each week and let students discuss how it can be solved and what can be the practical implications of such problems in real-life situation. For example, how mortgage payments are calculated or how to create an amortization table etc.
By: Dr. Zubair Ali Raja