By Afref Fetter 5 months ago Completed (Partially)

Prior experience in the field: None

Just as an introduction (and possibly a disclaimer), I never liked finance. I hoped this course would change my mind (or just give me another perspective) and I think it didn't really succeed.

Like:
Got to learn about the basic topics of finance well enough that I can probably read a few pages of the business paper now.

Got to learn how to use functions in Excel to simplify financial calculations.

Dislike:
The questions in the assignment were too tough - way tougher than the examples shown in the lectures. It felt like someone had thrown you out of a boat into the cold water and asked you to swim at full speed.

A lot of time in the lectures was spent talking about "non-finance" stuff (love/random topics). This would be great (and it was engaging initially), but it took up so much of the lecture time that you could forward through the lectures and not miss much.

There was hardly any explanation given on the assignment questions - even if you had finished them. The reason being given was that it would take them too much time to create a new set of questions for the next offering of the course and that people would easily copy the answers, but the answers were being handed out by the bunch on the discussion forums! Instead comments like "think again" or "try harder" or "draw it out" only served to make one feel like they were being mocked.

Suggested improvements:
Make the lectures less about the "love/feel" aspect and more about the finance aspect.

Give solutions to assignments.

Make lectures deal with more complex concepts, they dealt with obvious concepts.

Overall:
Left feeling very disappointed with the course. It promised so much, yet delivered so little. Definitely not a great course as an "introduction".

By Adam 4 months ago Completed

Prett poorly taught Finance course.

To echo and summarize others' opinions:
-course is poorly taught without covering some of the intuition presented in normal Finance courses. Too much time is taken covering more simple, algebra-related topics without covering the intuition behind higher level concepts
-lectures that don't hold my attention bc of the excessive love/peace/hugs
-homework is way harder and out of proportion with the lecture videos.

By Klippel Trenaunay 2 months ago Completed (Partially)

This was a great class for the 4 weeks took it. The instructor is awesome. He is very personable, he loves what he is doing and he very much cares and wants people to learn what he is teaching. He gives you everything you need to know when it comes to working out the problems on the quizzes and he does give you fair warning that he is going to not go easy on you and that you as the student are expected to work and that it's going to be a lot of work.

I expected this to be very serious and dry class; However, the instructor has a great sense of humor and is very engaging.

He states in the intro that he does not want you to have to take a lot of notes and that he does his best to make sure of that and he tries to make it obvious what he wants you to take notes on.

On the forums there are problems sets given that help with the weekly quizzes and the staff is great about helping with questions related to the material.

Over all a great class and a great staff.

I dropped the class because I could not give it the time it deserves and therefore that would be disrespectful to the instructor and the time and love he put into this (as he really seems to love this topic).

By Roger Leyster 4 months ago Completed (Partially)

Let me be clear from the start: I did not get past the first few lectures. Simply put, the lecturer talks too much.
A 10-minute lecture might contain 1 or 2 minutes of actual content. The rest of the time is spent saying things that have no relevance to the material.

This would be acceptable if this only happened now and again, but this recurred throughout the lectures I managed to finish.

Not my cup of tea.

By JT 56 days ago Completed (Partially)

This was a frustrating class. The first few weeks were awesome, but then things started to deteriorate. There were four main problems: 1) Principles were explained in a very simple way, but never presented in their complicated real-life settings during class. Instead, a lot of the practical applications were presented in increasingly difficult and complicated quiz questions. 2) The correct answers were NEVER provided for these quizzes, which were the main teaching tool. You could only take them twice and the questions changed. So if you got a question wrong you couldn't tell if you misplaced a decimal point, misunderstood the question, or completely got the principle wrong. If you didn't get it right the first or second time on your own, tough luck, no learning for you. I'm a smart guy and I usually do very well on exams, so I was okay there except for the thing which bothered me the most: 3) The quizzes, and the course itself, lacked rigor. When we learned a concept the professor shared his thoughts (and feelings) on it, but these were generally not tried and true refined principles. Rather they were short phrases in incomplete sentences that didn't make sense until they were explained, and they weren't explained very logically at times. I paid close attention and replayed different parts of the videos, and my notes still didn't end up making any sense. In the quizzes, the questions didn't always clearly explain all of the details, or explained them in a misleading way. English is a very demanding language, a misplaced or poorly chosen word completely changes the meaning of a sentence. A missing word leads to more confusion. I know the word is missing, I know it appears to him to be so obvious he doesn't think he needs to say it, but I can think of two different meanings for this statement by inserting a different missing adjective or noun in a different place. I found myself trying to put myself in his head and guess what he was trying to say. More than a few times I got questions right by thinking "the question says this thing, but I know he means that other thing". This might be a cultural thing, it seemed to me from the forums that the Indian students could understand him better than the American students, and you can also see that from the reviews here. 4) Finally, there was material that had to be learned in the middle of the class that was not actually taught in the class. He literally said, go learn statistics and come back. And then you had to know statistics (terms and mathematical equations) to answer the questions.
What ended up happening was people got frustrated. Unwilling to waste their chance of passing the class by messing up the quizzes, many people turned to cheating using methods I will not discuss for the integrity of future courses. In summary, there was very simplistic teaching that left a lot to be desired, poorly designed quiz questions, and zero helpful feedback to help anyone who was struggling. Every professor has their quirks, but the fact that the quizzes were used so heavily as teaching tools but the correct answers were not only not provided, but were clearly banned from discussion between students in order to protect the integrity of future classes, all while cheating was so rampant and obvious just killed this course for me. I don't care what the intentions were, what actually happened was that immoral people who cheated received a better experience, learned more, and got a certificate, while honest people learned less and flunked the course. When we attempt to do good things we need to use our brains to do it right. The answers to the quizzes should be provided so people could learn from their mistakes, and some values can be changed for the quiz questions for the next class so that the answers aren't the same. If professor Gautam put as much passion into educating us as he did in convincing us he is a super nice guy the course would have been awesome.

By Ricardo Teixeira from Antwerp 7 months ago Completed

This is good as an intuitive, introductory course (hence the name), but if you're someone like me who has a background in Economics and you just want to know more about Finance, you'll be kind of disappointed.

The Professor is highly enthusiastic and friendly - you really feel engaged by his style. However, this year's class was very light and informal - while the tests and exams were much more profound in terms of playing with concepts and math. The videos are very long because there's some circling around the topic and particularities of each topic are never objectively stated.

In sum, if you like qualitative classes on the topic that kind of give you a sense of the issues, and you like to learn through analogy and narrative, this course is for you. If, like me, you think learning using narratives is tremendously dangerous, and you find no replacement for formalism, math, and rigorous concepts (as much as Finance allows), look for other options.

By Rohit from New York, New York 7 months ago Completed

- Great communicator
- Easy to understand, clearly explains finance jargon to familiarize strangers to finance with the terms
- Reasonable workload expectations
- Assignments and final are a good level of difficulty for a beginner (imo)...not straight out of the lectures but some application is required

Don't have a reference to compare him to anyone else but personally I feel more knowledgeable about the topics covered in the course and had a pleasant experience going through it.

By Yunbin 3 days ago Completed

Like:
The instructor is awesome and he knows how to explain the concepts clearly. His sense of humour and passion about life is really engaging.

Dislike:
1. The assignments and exams are far more difficult than the easy and intuitive examples used in the lectures. No answer or solution is given so the students are on their own to figure out whether they misunderstand concept or they just do not type the answer in correct format.

2. The instructor and TAs never look at discussion forum and they forbid any detailed solution to assignment to be posted even after the deadline. Only two community TAs and some helpful students provide helps and practice questions.

3. The requirement to get a certificate is the strictest and least flexible among all courses I take.

By treemantan from Jinan, Shandong Sheng 2 months ago Taking Course Now

Nice Course which makes me excited about Finance that it never happened before for me as a undergraduate in mathematics school. And the suggested textbook is really appreciable for me and I feel like swallowing them without seconds. Maybe the first four weeks are not very tough and of course, I'll keep up with the pace of this course. By the way , the forum is fantastic and enjoyble for me which make me sovle some problems about crucial concepts and some other assignment. In short, taking the course is nice option, I suppose, at least for me which have been in this course for 4 weeks.

By james dong 5 months ago Completed

very intresting course and teacher.I learned many basic principles of finance.The experience of leaning the course encourage me to study more.

By Mainul Alin from Dhaka, Dhaka 6 months ago Completed

-Great lectures
-Slow but builds very good intuition
-Touches upon lots of topic in finance
-Good practice problems

By QuickeneR 6 months ago Not Completed

I have somewhat mixed feeling about this course. From the start, I knew next to nothing about what finance is all about, and Prof Kaul did a really good job of explaining it. But somewhere from the middle of the course when the basic things were all explained and understood, the details started to matter. Yet the style of videos remained the same, full of make-yourselves-comfortable chat.
I remember, while trying to do the quiz after one week, I caught myself being unable to remember if the professor casually mentioned something related to the question in the middle of another ten minute talk of how we could pause the video and take a break at any time and how important love is. Instead of re-watching the videos I tried looking for an answer in one of the suggested books. How much more helpful the book was! How specific and precise and easy to skip back and forth. I no longer wanted to watch the boring videos, and dropped the course.
IMHO lectures by people like Professor Kaul could benefit greatly from an editor who is not afraid of some huge cutting.

By Laura Cushing from West Berlin, New Jersey 6 months ago Completed (Partially)

I really liked the professor of this course - he made the matterials less dry than a finance course might otherwise be. I wasn't able to complete this course past about three weeks because my own math skills weren't up to par to keep up with it.