Preface
Welcome to Corporate Finance, v2.1! Whether it’s your first time teaching or you are an experienced professor of finance, these course materials are probably unlike any that you have used in your career. Throughout the authors’ combined 50+ years of teaching introductory finance, they noticed some dramatic changes in how students learn and how you teach their course. We created Corporate Finance to address these sweeping changes in the teaching and learning process.
Technology: Transforming Learning
The current generation of students (born after 1995) are the iGeneration. So named because they were virtually born with a smartphone in hand. iGeneration students spend time outside of class on console gaming, watching YouTube videos, and on apps like SnapChat, Tik-Tok, Facebook, and Twitter. Today’s students are intolerant of non-engaging teaching techniques. They expect their learning resources to be digital, graphic and wireless. We created Corporate Finance to meet the expectations of iGeneration students and so enhance their engagement in learning finance.
When creating this book, we weighed carefully which type of multimedia would best communicate and assess the information that students need to know and how you want to teach them. As a result, we leverage technology to make learning finance as easy and fun as possible.
Let Corporate Finance Teach the Mechanics Through Video Presentations
Education has two stages: 1) information transfer; and 2) assimilation. The assimilation stage is when students make their own mental model of the ideas. In traditional introductory finance courses, a lot of class time is spent teaching students the mathematical computations (information transfer) and not much time is left for teaching the application (assimilation).
Corporate Finance is designed to shoulder the burden of teaching the formulas and computations. That way, you can use your class time to teach problem solving, analyze cases, or discuss current financial events. This design allows Corporate Finance to be used successfully in a traditional lecture-style course and equally well in online courses, hybrid courses, or flipped classrooms.
Corporate Finance key technological advantage lies in the wealth of author-recorded videos embedded in the digital text. The combination of text and video gives students multiple explanations for each idea so if they don’t understand one, they have recourse to another. This teaching design greatly reduces learner frustration.
There are over 300 author-generated videos strategically placed throughout the text. Each video is between 1–5 minutes in length and can be used to introduce topics, explain operations, and provide 24/7 review so that students can learn anytime and anywhere they have live web connection. These embedded videos are divided into three categories:
“Explain It” videos demonstrate key concepts and clarify topics that typically confuse learnings.
“Explore It” videos provide richer context for an operation or calculation to illuminate the concept behind the mechanics.
Solutions videos provide detailed explanations of solutions to examples in three ways: algebra, calculator, and downloadable Excel spreadsheet templates. The first shows the general approach to the solution, the algebra involved, and explains the intuition behind the solution. The other two solutions videos show the mechanics of the solution with either a financial calculator or Excel.
Finally, if you want your students to learn spreadsheet basics, Corporate Finance gives them the tools to learn them. Most examples have a downloadable spreadsheet template that is accompanied by a video explaining the layout and functions used in the spreadsheet.
Quizzes: Reading & Comprehension
A trend in university education is that students don’t buy the textbook or, if they do, many don’t read it. A significant proportion of those who read the text lack an effective reading strategy and therefore fail to absorb the main ideas. We have addressed both issues by embedding a large number of quiz questions, organized by section, throughout the online reader version of the book. This affords students the opportunity to self-test as they read. Reading comprehension is enhanced by the quizzes, because if students cannot answer the quiz question correctly, then they are immediately alerted that their grasp of the surrounding material is lacking. These online quizzes promote self-regulation: they empower students to take responsibility for their own learning.
Autograded Homework
Homework is where the bulk of learning happens, and Corporate Finance makes assigning homework easy. Each chapter in Corporate Finance has 50–70 corresponding questions in FlatWorld’s online homework system that is available to adopters and their students at no additional charge. These problems have multiple variations, detailed solutions, and are autograded. With multiple variations of the same problem, students get different numbers. As a result, cheating isn’t as simple as sharing the solution value. We have also found that students won’t attempt problems without detailed solutions to help them better understand how the problem is correctly worked. Every problem has a detailed solution that students can view if they get the answer wrong. Finally, all homework problems are autograded, saving faculty the time-consuming process of hand grading, and student-performance data automatically flow to the associated gradebook. Thus, students receive immediate feedback on their progress and so do you. The gradebook is invaluable in helping to identify and remediate students who procrastinate or underinvest in homework or reading.
The problems are organized by major sub-section in FlatWorld Homework and, within each section, by degree of difficulty. The clear organization of problems makes customizing homework easy.
Rich Resources Support Effective Teaching
Corporate Finance comes with a suite of supplements (all written by the textbook authors) so it can be used in any course format.
Instructor’s Manual with chapter overviews and summaries; classroom activities and discussion questions, a quick quiz, and a mini case ideal for flipped class implementation.
PowerPoint Slides include many original examples different from those in the text. These PPT slides have been extensively used by the authors over many years with their own students.
Test Item File contains over 2,000 items written by the authors and vetted with the authors own students over a period of two decades. The breadth of the test item file provides adopters with plentiful options for assessing student learning. Each question is classified by learning outcome and difficulty level. The test items are available as part of an online test generator powered by Cognero that enables printed tests. For faculty who are using a learning management system (LMS), the test items are also formatted and packaged for easy import into popular LMSs such as Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace/D2L, Moodle, and Respondus.
Free Online Homework System—FlatWorld Homework Do you want to find out how your class is doing? Or know if your students comprehend the material being covered? Measuring class progress and comprehension is easy using FlatWorld’s web-based homework system. And the best part: The system is free. Students get access to the homework system with their textbook at no extra cost. It’s also easy to use—you can create an assignment in minutes by selecting questions from a pool of specifically designed, multi-format questions (plus some of your own if you want), and FlatWorld does the rest. The system provides feedback to each student and class statistics to you. It can be accessed through FlatWorld’s stand-alone interface or through your learning management system (e.g., Canvas, Moodle, Brightspace/D2L, Black-board). Students can complete their homework assignment from any device using a standard web browser. To learn more about the system and to watch a demo go to https://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/homework.
Sample Syllabi provide useful templates to help new adopters easily transition their course to embrace Corporate Finance as the assigned text and lend insights to existing adopters on how to more effectively organize their classes.
Of course, Corporate Finance’s online delivery makes it ideal for online courses. But Corporate Finance can also be used in a variety of in-class formats. In a lecture format, faculty can use videos to supplement their own presentations. Those who want additional class activities can use those supplied in the Instructor’s Manual. Adopting faculty implementing a flipped teaching model can use the online quiz questions embedded in the digital reader or create pre-lecture quizzes in FlatWorld Homework to motivate before-class reading, the mini cases for classroom activities, and FlatWorld Homework problems (and test bank problems) to generate after-class autograded assignments.
We are confident that Corporate Finance provides all the tools to transform your students to active, engaged learners, and motivates them to continue their studies in finance. We also hope that adopting Corporate Finance makes teaching finance more fun for you. It certainly has for us.
Thank you once again for choosing Corporate Finance.
Sincerely,
Stan Eakins
William McNally