June 23, 2016

Money decisions: Professor's free online course joins basic facts, guidance on acts

In today's complex financial world, people everywhere would like to achieve some level of "financial literacy" in making choices for spending, saving, insuring, investing and more. A self-paced edX course by Purdue professor Sugato Chakravarty, built on his 20-plus years of teaching this subject, has attracted learners worldwide and continues to be available for new enrollment.

Chakravarty also is developing a more advanced course in a different format for those who wish to pursue the subject to the level of professional skills.

Chakravarty's first online course, called Personal Finance Planning, reflects his concentration on daily learning about daily financial matters. The course is available free as a MOOC -- a massive open online course -- through edX, a consortium of many of the world's most prominent universities including Purdue. For those who wish, a $50 fee will provide a Verified Certificate usable in a resume, college applications or to enhance a profile such as on LinkedIn.

"Look around you every day and try to discover at least one new event or thing where you can apply financial principles to better understand how it works," says Chakravarty, who is professor of consumer science in the College of Health and Human Sciences. For him, that means the teacher leaves out the jargon and buzzwords and lets students find the joy of discovering how things actually work and how to make use of them. It's an approach that also matches his vision of greater knowledge among a global audience.

The MOOC has attracted large numbers of students from a wide age range, though designed to be suitable for high schoolers. As of June 21, the course had more than 24,000 registrants from 185 countries with a median age of 32. Nearly half are from the United States. Though a MOOC requires an adequate computer and connection, the process of taking an edX course is not considered difficult.

Some of the course's topics are:

* How to invest your money when you don’t have too much time to devote to it.
* Whether to buy or lease.
* Whether to rent or borrow.
* How insurance works.
* When and how to invest best for retirement.
* How to recognize the ways not all credit (and credit cards) are created equal and which one is right for you.

Chakravarty sees personal finance as like the saying from football, "Offense wins games, and defense wins championships." To develop a champion's approach, he wants his students to know how to play both, and he has designed the course with that in mind.

Chakravarty transformed his classroom experience into a MOOC through a grant from edX. Now he is taking a next step, developing a course in the same subject area but at the level of professional skills and competency and presented in a more interactive way with additional content. That course will be available for purchase on Purdue NExT. Staff members at Purdue NExT helped him shape the MOOC and they are involved in his coming course: Advanced Personal Finance.

The MOOC, Personal Finance Planning, uses lecture videos, articles and supplementary reading. Enrollees can participate in lively discussions. Because they go at their own pace, Chakravarty says, "The goal is that every student going through the materials should get something that they resonate to even if they don't finish the entire course."


About edX: EdX was founded in 2012 by Harvard University and MIT to provide online learning. It has more than 90 partner institutions worldwide, and the colleges and universities govern it.

About this course: Personal Finance Planning is free, offered in English, and designed to involve three to four hours a week during its five-week term. It is suited to high schoolers but also taken by adults of all ages worldwide.

About Purdue NExT: Purdue NExT, a unit of Purdue's Digital Education area, offers interactive, online professional development courses reinforcing skills applicable immediately to professional-level competencies. They provide exclusive content and the latest knowledge of Purdue professors and thus require a fee except for enrolled Purdue students. They are not the same as "regular" Purdue courses and offer continuing education units (CEUs) rather than college credit.


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