Online Education:Case Study on the Course of Financial Engineering

Department of Management,Tianjin University Renai College,Tianjin,China Email:chenrongforever@163.com

[Abstract]Due to the impact of the covid-19 epidemic,the Ministry of Education of China called“classes suspended but learning continues”.All teachers and students started to prepare and proceed online education.Most of them were involved in online education at the first time.This paper is taking a special course of students majored in Financial Engineering as an example to state how to complete online courses in detail from three aspects:before classes,during classes and after classes.Concluding the whole process through this case study,suggestions on how to make a better online course are proposed in the last part.

[Keywords]Epidemic period;Online education;Case study

Introduction

The sudden outbreak of the covid-19 epidemic in 2020 has broken the normal life of everyone and posed new challenges to teachers’teaching and students’learning.Under the call of the Ministry of Education of China that“classes suspended but teaching continues,classes suspended but learning continues”,there are various works to prepare for online teaching as a college teacher,such as to investigate online teaching modes,online teaching methods and online teaching resources,etc.,in order to provide reference basis for online teaching.A lot of literatures have been studied on how to conduct online teaching and how to manage students when they study trough internet at home.It should promote the identification of online teaching,improve the proficiency of teaching platform,promote the cooperation and mutual assistance between teachers of different majors,encourage teachers with higher age and teaching age to actively participate in online teaching,encourage young teachers to actively participate in online teaching and other ways to promote the normalization of online teaching(Gou,2020,pp.5-13).When selecting information technology,teachers should grasp and deal with relevant contents such as taking teaching as the center,integrating information technology into education and teaching,privacy protection,amount of curriculum learning,curriculum thinking and politics,etc(Guo&Gao,2020,pp.17-21).It should encourage teachers to make a good use of network resources to provide students with driven learning tasks,build network class community to manage students so that they could feel that online teaching likes a real class(Jiao&Zhou&Chen,2020,pp.106-113).It also could encourage teachers to work as a team so that the teaching resources can be shared with each other and to promote the orderly and effective development of online teaching(Wang,et al.,2020,pp.56-58).There may be changes of online education from four aspects at the post-epidemic,which are from educational resources,students learning,courses reform,and educational technology(Xue&Guo,2020,pp.65-74).

Introduction to Financial Engineering is a specialized course of students majored in Financial Engineering,which have been conducted online education during this special semester.It is going to summarize the related work of researching and development of online teaching below,taking this course as an example,in order to rethinking online education and provide some suggestions to improve online education in the future.

Prepare Before Classes,Explore the New Mode of Online Teaching

Is online teaching the same as traditional teaching? This is the first question that comes to mind.At first,the idea was simple,the online teaching was nothing but taking teachers and students together on the network from the traditional classroom.It just needed to continue the previous teaching mode as college teachers.However,the idea was quickly rejected because of testing on XUE XI TONG APP with students.It found that students cannot receive the teachers’messages timely through internet as same as in the traditional classroom,due to the limited network or to the function of the APP.

Then,what exactly is online teaching and learning?To find out what the online courses look like and how the online teaching content and context have been designed and arranged,it started to investigate the established online courses,such as provided by the APP and several MOOCs(short for Massive Open Online Courses)websites.Starting to learn from the different online courses of financial engineering and other similar online courses,online teaching can be concluded as a kind of collection with abundant teaching resources and teaching modes,in which teachers should play the role of the“architect”,to select the resources suitable for students and the resources that students are interested in from the various rich resources,arrange the selected teaching resources combination in the teaching calendar.Online education should transform the passive learning into the active learning of students as the leading factor.Another feature of online courses is resource sharing.For example,many video resources of the high quality courses in the video library of XUE XI TONG APP and public MOOCs websites such as icources.cn,icource163.org,relevant learning materials and question banks of established online courses can be shared with each other,and teachers in the same team can build courses collaboratively and share resources with each other.In addition,Tencent conference,DingTalk live class,WeChat,QQ and other platforms provide many options for online live classes.Therefore,for the course Introduction to Financial Engineering,the new online teaching model adopted as follows:trying to build an online course in XUE XI TONG APP,integrating resources,taking the MOOCs as the main learning form for students,and making good use of various functions provided by the software to improve the teaching effect;explaining assignments through live webcast platforms to provide support for MOOCs online courses and to enhance emotional communication with students;releasing notices and answering questions in real time through the established WeChat group to make students feel that teachers are always there.

Implement During Classes,Manage the New Class of Online Teaching

After choosing a suitable platform and teaching mode,“what to teach”becomes the second question in front of us.Online teaching just changes the traditional“teaching-centered”to“learning-centered”.What students can learn becomes the goal of the whole teaching activity,and the role of teachers is to assist students to achieve the expected learning goals.Because the students were unable to back to school temporarily,the materials ordered before can’t be sent to each student timely.To solve the problem,an electronic version of the textbook can be found from online resources and uploaded to the learning database in XUE XI TONG,so it can be downloaded if students need at any time.And it can ensure that every student had a textbook during online education classes at home.The PPT,syllabus and calendar of the course and other related materials of all teaching chapters were also uploaded to the database for students to consult at any time.

First,according to the teaching syllabus,the teaching content was reintegrated and rearranged according to the weekly class hours.The weekly study task would release before every class began and set as the task point to require every student to complete on time,so that students can learn independently at home with a clear mind and step by step in an orderly way.There were 12 learning tasks written in total,and all learning content would be completed by students within 12 weeks.The weekly learning task planned the learning content,the key and difficult points and teaching arrangement of each class every week clearly,including videos of MOOCs to be learnt,reading materials,classroom activities,live Q&A,etc.That can let students study content clearly,urge students to take a week as a learning unit to arrange study.The more detailed and reasonable the teacher’s plan is,the more effective and leisurely students will learn.

Next,the selected high quality course videos were set up into the chapter catalogues of the established online course in XUE XI TONG.The integrated video resource structure is compact and suitable for the course characteristics.In order to enable students to better grasp the knowledge points,recording several videos of PPT to lecture series and sorting out the key points and difficulties of each class were required.It can be taken as a supplement to the video learning of MOOCs.Also,question banks of each chapter were built so it can arrange homework and in-class tests to practice while learning for students.It should correct homework and give feedback timely.In addition,it took advantage of Tencent conference and the DingTalk live broadcast to explain homework,answer questions,and actively carry out ideological and political courses,so as to solve students’difficulties in online learning during the epidemic period and relieve their emotions.

In addition to the integration and arrangement of teaching resources,the management is also an extremely important work,that is,teachers should solve the problem of "how to teach".In order to achieve the same effect in the process of learning in the traditional classroom for students who continues learning at home,active innovation in management methods is required.Teachers should pay more time and energy to manage students,strengthen process management,and put forward higher requirements and regulations for students.For example,students were required to take photos to sign in before each class through the APP,to increase the sense of ritual of online class.The established WeChat group,a real-time communication.could remind the students to sign in before each class,briefly explain the main learning content for each class,answer questions in real time,and urge students who lagged behind to catch up.It should make full use of the classroom activities provided by XUE XI TONG APP,such as quick answer,random selection,test,questionnaire,etc.After each class,it should check the learning effect for every student to fully improve the participation of students in online learning,to enhance the interaction of students in online teaching,to praise students who answer questions correctly,to let students have a sense of presence,to encourage students to share their views bravely,and to find out the advantages of students.In the classroom activities providing by the APP,when students answered questions incorrectly,it could explain why their answers ware wrong to students through the classroom activities in time to ensure the quality of teaching.In the general learning process,students were required to upload photos of their notes for checking weekly.This can urge them to go over what have been learned after class.

Summarize After Classes,Reflect on Shortcomings of Online Teaching

In the whole online teaching process,most students were able to complete the online learning content and classroom activities on time and communicate with teachers to solve problems in time.However,it is inevitable to encounter students who always fall behind the team when they have difficulties in learning,which requires teachers to summarize timely after class,communicate with students more,fully understand students and learn about their situation,so as to improve teaching methods continuously,check loopholes and fill up weak points timely.All of these can be done by checking the completion of each task point through the classroom statistics function providing by XUE XI TONG APP.After checking,it should query the list of students who have not completed the task,call the name in WeChat group,and ask the reason why they have not completed the task at the end of the learning task every week.First,it could observe the response of students’having not completed the tasks.If they have a positive attitude,it could extend the deadline of the task points and let the students make up as soon as possible.If some students were having a loose attitude,it would try to chat with him on WeChat privately to ask him if there are any difficulties in learning that he had before,and try to help him build confidence in learning,and give him a chance to catch up as soon as possible.In the process of mutual communication,the distance between teachers and students can be drawn,and a relationship of mutual trust can be established,so that students can feel the teacher’s sincerity and realize the importance of learning.Sometimes talking with some students to ask about the situation of latest online teaching can get students’ideas,so it could adjust the teaching arrangements dynamically,and stick to the“student-centered”teaching philosophy.

In addition,it can be seen that students were more active in online classes from the process of students’participation in classroom activities,which is in contrast to the traditional teaching.For example,a scheduled 30-minutes class activity will normally stretch to 40 or 50 minutes to complete.The reason is that most students were likely to participate the classroom activities provided by the APP.Using the“select someone”function to issue a question,if the selected student did not answer correctly,there would be followed by 20 or 30 messages to answer the question,like“brush screen”.Although it should be the chosen student answering the question,other students would also prepare their own answers actively.When they found that the chosen student did not answer correctly,they seemed to be full of spirit and sent out their prepared answers as quickly as possible,and most of the answers are correct.It was in contrast to the performance of students in the traditional classroom before.Therefore,the traditional teaching should be combined with online teaching to attract the attention of students,fully mobilize the enthusiasm of students,let students have more engagement and a sense of achievement,make the teaching more interesting,enrich the contents of the class and shorten the distance of teacher and student.At the same time,it also can test students’learning.For such a group of young people who are often active in the Internet,online teaching is a very worthy promotion of teaching methods.

Conclusions and Suggestions

Compared with traditional teaching,there are more obvious advantages of online education,such as mobilizing students’learning initiative,broadening their learning space and time,and emphasizing process management.The convenience of breaking through the time and space limitation is brought by educational technology improving so that the rate of questions and interaction frequency of students are significantly higher than offline classroom during online teaching time(Liu&Liu,2020,pp.31-41).But there are also some shortcomings,such as unable to face to face emotional communication with students,lack of sense of belonging,unable to fully grasp the learning state of every student from the screen,some students having some problems such as poor self-discipline and poor learning effect.According to the case study,it requires teachers to learn and hold more online study resources before preparing an online course.It should encourage teachers to care more about students and innovative management methods of online classes.It also should put forward high requirements on the image of teachers’live streaming,the language of recording class hours,the proficiency of software operation.From the school’s point of view,it should organize several online teaching seminars for teachers to share experiences and learn from each other.From the point of view of software developers,it should hold some trainings to share the features of the online courses construction.It is necessary for teachers to innovate teaching management methods and combine them with traditional teaching methods to better teach each lesson.