Good morning everybody
Welcome to 'Understanding Your Financial World 2013'. You can now start working on the course - use your existing user name and password to logon.
If you look in the newspaper you will see lots of things happening that will affect our financial world. This course will help you to understand those events and their financial impact on you better.
The course starts today and will run until the end of September (8 weeks). There are quizzes and short pieces of work sprinkled throughout the course. These are intended to help you to reinforce your learning and not for formal assessment (you are required to complete the work to be eligible for the certificate but the work is not graded). Two submissions of your reflective journal are required; one at the end of week 4 (on September 2) and at the end of the course (on September 30). You will also need to complete these to be eligible for the certificate (again, they will not be graded but I do expect to see that you are putting an effort into reflecting and completing your journals - one line comments will not be sufficient). I will be keeping an eye on how you are progressing during the course but do keep in touch on how you're going - especially if you're having problems.
You will be pleased to know that I am making changes to the readings for the course. Instead of giving you copies of pages from textbooks (which is what we did when we ran this course last year), I am summarising these for you so that you don't have to do as much reading (although you can still go to those textbooks if you're sufficiently interested!). That's why only Week 1 is showing - I'm still working on the summaries! I will open succeeding weeks as I complete the summaries and Week 2 should be available before the end of the week.
This course is more 'academic' than other Fin-Ed courses. Don't let that put you off - there's a lot happening in our financial world and this course will help you to put those events in context. Because there is so much happening please feel free to ask questions and discuss the meaning of happenings among yourselves in the discussion forum.
I hope you enjoy this course and I look forward to working with you.
Cheers
Arnold