Friday, December 02, 2005

Preparing for next semester

Well, marking is well and truly done for semester 2, results were released on Wednesday, and I'm starting to prepare for next semester. I've decided to front load all my teaching for the year into first semester next year, so I have three different courses to teach. Two are courses I've taught before -- intro financial management at undergrad and postgrad level -- so they'll be pretty easy. The third, Personal Financial Management, is new to me. It's been taught twice before, each time with a different lecturer, and the materials are becoming dated. So, I've decided to adopt a new textbook rather than spend my summer researching and updating the current set of teaching materials. It would be easy enough to spend the whole summer working on teaching, but what I really need to be doing is finishing up my research projects. So, a professionally prepared textbook, just published with web updates and full instructor support including test bank, seems like the smart way to go. Now I just have to decide what topics to cover and to what depth. This is a first year course with no pre-requisites, so I need to be careful about what background I'm assuming.