Nuvolos

Initial situation

The Financial Econometrics course is mandatory for students following the Master in Wealth Management and optional for students of the GSEM Masters in Statistics and Economics.

Traditionally, the course format was not very flexible and consisted of theoretical lectures and practical seminars where students used the programming software Matlab. To use the latter, students had to go to computer rooms. This made it difficult for the teaching staff to follow each student individually in their learning process, as most of them had never taken a programming course during their university studies.

The teacher’s objective was to have a unique learning environment entirely online, allowing the teaching of theoretical content, to carry out the practical work and to follow the students’ learning.

Project implementation

The teacher chose to use the Nuvolos web platform. Similar to Moodle, this platform allows to create a course space and to structure it in a way to propose a variety of resources and pedagogical activities. In particular, the teacher makes available pedagogical videos (screencasts developed with Camtasia software), annotated slides, streaming made with Vimeo as well as Zoom recordings (question and answer sessions).

In addition to a classic learning environment, Nuvolos also offers online storage and analysis of large databases via different programming languages (RStudio, Python, Julia, Stata, SPSS and Matlab). For his course, the teacher chose the Jupyter Notebook (Python) programming environment, which allows him to present notes, code and data in an intuitive way to facilitate learning programming.

This platform allows students to acquire solid knowledge of the theoretical subject, but above all to put it into practice by learning to manage and analyze real financial databases, skills that are in high demand on the employment market.

All the resources and activities proposed in the flipped classroom allow students to familiarize themselves with the concepts and to practice the analyses individually in an asynchronous way. The synchronous sessions with the teaching staff become much more participative.

Thoughts and advice

The choice of such a platform for programming/data analysis puts all students on an equal footing. There is no software installation to be done, the computing power is no longer linked to the individual equipment of the students and access is simply via any browser. From a logistical point of view, there is also no need to reserve a computer room and ask for the installation of specific software.

From a pedagogical point of view, the students are more autonomous in their learning, the teaching team has access in real time to the practical work of each student and can thus bring a help in case of blocking.

The subscription to Nuvolos and the acquisition of real financial databases represent a significant cost. Note that this platform can also be used for research purposes, possibility for several researchers to share databases and share/annotate their analyses for publication or for a teacher to supervise Master / Doctorate works.

Student feedback

“Professor Scaillet challenges us to learn and be more critical. I like the way he structured the Q&A sessions.” “Interesting subject, well structured.” “Professor Scaillet rightly anticipated the impact the pandemic would have on the teaching methods and the exams and nicely adopted the teaching methods to suit the circumstance. This is a big plus for him because unlike other lectures in the faculty where we have been surprised by huge changes, especially in terms of exam modalities, with Prof Scaillet, all had advanced well the whole time. So, really thanks to him. ” “The course is well structured and the teacher has a deep knowledge of the subject, which allows us to go well beyond the programme if we want to. I think the course prepares well for interviews in the finance field as well as for professions in finance. “Some of the concepts are perhaps sometimes covered too superficially. Most of us are certainly familiar with the concepts in econometrics and statistics seen in class. However, the diversity of our backgrounds means that we have not seen several concepts in the past which are then completely foreign to us. It might be relevant to survey the students at the beginning of the course to see who is familiar or not with the models and concepts studied. “The organisation and structuring of the course facilitates learning. The screencasts to be viewed beforehand followed by Q&A sessions are relevant especially in the current context.” (COVID Crisis)