Increasing Student Responsibility And Active Learning In An Undergraduate Capstone Finance Course

Abstract

This paper focuses on the effectiveness of factors in designing and delivering a complex, capstone course in an undergraduate major in finance. The course uses an instructional delivery system that is contrasted to the standard lecture format and has a broader set of objectives than is usually specified for a finance course. An objective of the instructional design of the course is to harness student responsibility while making them more active participants in the delivery of the content. The goal is to equip them to solve the typical non-structured problems they will deal with in their professional careers.

The effect of these factors is measured by analyzing this course compared to all other finance courses taken. The outcomes of this paper show that this method is superior to the standard lecture method across a variety of scales. This provides insight into the future development of this method for this type of course, as well as ideas for developing other advanced instructional delivery systems for similar complex courses.