What Is Different from The Longer Course Outlines?
This course outline is a condensed form of our other course outlines designed for quarter- or semester- long classes. Due to the condensed nature of enrichment programs, the overall content is roughly the same load as our 9-week course outline, but with additional time spent on in-class activities, videos, and discussion points.
In terms of course content, ordering, and pacing, the biggest change is that our Investing unit is moved to the front of the course. This is because giving students a hands-on component with the PersonalFinanceLab™ stock game is a cornerstone of our investment learning experience, and it is important to have as long of a trading period as possible to allow students to have the maximum exposure to how events in the real world can impact their portfolio.
In a typical 9- or 18- week course, we also recommend teachers close their class stock game before the end of the class so students can prepare final reports and presentations. In our enrichment program outlines, we recommend teachers extend the stock game beyond the end of the program, giving students the opportunity to continue to watch their portfolio grow (and practice investing strategies and research themselves) beyond the end of the course.
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Setting Up Your Class
PersonalFinanceLab is highly customizable for your class. However, to make the most of our recommended projects, we encourage teachers to use the following settings when setting up their class (these settings are specific to this 9-week course outline):
Budget Game
- Set up a 12-month game, where students are “Part Time” for the first 6 months, “Full Time” for the last 6 months (we include a “midpoint review” project that hinges on this transition). Budgeting starts in the 2nd unit of the game, and the course outline sets aside time to complete up to 12 months over the course of the enrichment program.
- Do NOT enable speed limits for your session. As the course session is quite short, speed limits would interfere with the daily course progression.
- You can use our pre-sets for bill expenses or choose settings more directly related to your area. However, confirm at the preview at the bottom of the screen that students should be able to save 10% of their income each month.
Stock Game
- Create your stock game by giving students $10,000 of initial cash.
- After your class has been set up and students have registered, utilize our Teams feature to organize your class into groups of 2 or more students per team. This will allow students to place their own trades, while aggregating team portfolios.
Our last recommended activity for the class involves each group making a 5-minute presentation to the class, and so we recommend you adjust your group sizes accordingly to allow all groups present in the same day at the end of class.
Your Assignments
Each unit outline has our recommended assignment tasks. The class begins with a pre-test and ends with a post-test, and the course outline specifies our recommended assigned tasks for each day.
Instead of having a single assignment for each day, we recommend grouping each of the 5 units in to their own “Assignment”, which students will complete over the course of 2-3 days (and give students who need more time a chance to catch up). You can find out more about creating assignments at our admin guide here.
