Lessons from Teaching Undergraduate Finance Online.

With the continuing growth of student enrollment in online courses, teaching classes in an online format is becoming part of life for many educators. Teaching courses online is a challenging task and educators can benefit from the experiences of other educators when preparing for this challenge. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it lists some important observations that can help an educator create effective online courses. Second, it describes some insights from teaching online finance courses, specifically. As most academic leaders feel that student learning in online classes is inferior to face-to-face classes, the author also investigates the performance difference between students of online and face-to-face finance classes she has taught. In summary, online classes can be very time consuming to prepare, teachers have to be very well organized and should familiarize themselves with popular “best practices” methods. In addition, the use of appropriate technology and the ability to use the technology effectively is a very important aspect of online course creation. The use of an online homework program, a financial calculator emulator, and a screen capturing software are particularly crucial for online finance courses. The evaluation of the performance results for the author’s finance courses suggests that her online students do not significantly underperform face to face students