Project development

Initial situation

This course is interdisciplinary and therefore welcomes students from different backgrounds with heterogeneous knowledge and skills. It was therefore important to find a course content and format that would be suitable for everyone and in which no one would be bored. Moreover, this is an innovative field of study for which there is no textbook yet.

Project implementation

The course format allows students to choose what they want to learn, to create the material from which they will learn, and to present a production that reflects what they have learned. The students (their interests and prior knowledge) are thus the starting point of the course; they create a learning medium not only for themselves but also for other students. They are fully active and involved in their training. They will, in fact, set their own objectives for the course by determining the grade and the number of credits they would like to obtain. They are thus led to reflect on their presence in the course and what they expect from it.

During the 1st course, the teacher asks the students to write on a post-it the subject on which they would like to work. In the following classes, theoretical elements and research avenues in the mentioned fields are provided to them in class or through articles to be read. They then choose the research topic they would like to develop and must build the problematic around it. After numerous group discussions, in class or with the teacher, they must narrow down their interests to a specific research question, define how to answer it and how to implement it concretely. They must also write a paragraph each week to track their progress.

The evaluation of the course is based on their final presentation, the format of which they choose (article, poster, podcast, video). More than the subject they have worked on, they must present what they have learned and how they have learned it.

This course format allows students to be extremely free in the choice and realization of their project. They have a great deal of autonomy while benefiting from group reflection time, which allows them to exchange and benefit from the skills and points of view of each other.

Thoughts and advice

The key to such a course format is to get students to articulate what they want to do and learn and to articulate it regularly as they progress. It is important that they learn to communicate. Communication between a teacher and a student is an important aspect of this course format. Giving clear, structured, and encouraging feedback is necessary to ensure that the student does not stray from the chosen topic and that he/she has grasped the key concepts. The exchanges between students are very constructive and often formulated in a benevolent way.

It is also worthwhile not to be afraid to encourage students to invest themselves fully in their project and to let their creativity run free. It might even be possible to forbid them to write a report to push them to do a project that takes a more innovative form. Similarly, it is sometimes necessary to be careful that very enthusiastic students do not commit themselves to projects that are too large.

Student feedback

“Thanks to the relatively loose format of this course, this semester I was able to work through the debate regarding Altruism, combine a “meta-analysis” of the literature and numerous interviews with experts from different fields to learn more about the topic and further refine my next research question. During this course, I also learned a lot about neuroeconomics (slide presentations, journals, and books), and I was able to learn a lot from my classmates, who were passionate about really interesting research questions mainly in Neuromarketing and Decision Science.” “This course has the distinction of having piqued my curiosity about an exciting topic that I look forward to pursuing in the coming years.” “I really liked the way the course was thought out, quite unconventional and different from what I experienced before at Unige. What I liked most was the freedom we had for our project, […] just being able to deliver something about a topic that really piqued my interest is really satisfying. [Of all the courses I’ve taken, this is one that didn’t feel like a burden. I can say that I had a lot of fun doing my project and sharing with you some of the things I developed an undeniable interest in.” “During the first few sessions, there was a balance of lecture and practice (in-class reflection on different terms, project work). For a 4-hour course, I think this is the best setting (2 hours of lecture and 2 hours of practice). Unfortunately, the last sessions were more focused on practice (reflection on the project), leaving out the theoretical part. I would say, maybe, that the first sessions were better than the last ones which were more focused on the project. In each class, we had to explain the purpose of our project, talk about different issues and the feedback we wanted to produce. However, the best part of the course was the project. Despite the fact that it required a significant number of hours of work, reading the literature, hypothesizing and thinking about paradigms, allowed me to improve my knowledge of a specific area of reinforcement learning, as well as potentially create a new study.” “A modern approach to learning that gave all students the freedom to expand on almost anything we wanted regarding the different disciplines that contribute to the field of Neurofinance. I really enjoyed diving into the topic of bias, and even though my presentation didn’t show it, I also learned other concepts. For example, being a student in a basic science lab, I was not aware of the field of motivation until I took this class. I liked this course so much, especially listening to Dan Ariely, that I thought about doing a short-term internship in the “Geneva Motivation Lab.”