Our Project

Finance Fundamentals is a project supported by the Teaching Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The project was initiated by Principal Investigator Darren Degraff and three co-applicants — Murray Carlson, Sunah Cho, and Susie Chen — to support flexible learning and promote student-professor collaboration at the Sauder School of Business.

Introduction to Finance (COMM 298), a required course for every UBC Bachelor of Commerce (BCom) student, is regarded as one of the most conceptually challenging courses in the Commerce program. The goal of this project is to develop accessible, flexible, and engaging academic resources that students can use to supplement their learning in this course.

Finance Fundamentals is a compilation of tutorial videos and practice questions created by our team of BCom students, with support from UBC Sauder instructors Darren Dagraff and Caren Lombard. The framework of this project is rooted in the expanding field of Supplemental Instruction, (SI) and inspired by Students as Partners (SaP) models; students were encouraged to take on leadership and management roles in the creation of these supplementary resources.

Our objective is to support student understanding of financial valuation, quantitative analysis of corporate and individual financing, and savings decisions by providing interactive videos and practice problems. We believe that developing these resources will help students to gain an in-depth understanding of course concepts and learn how to apply these concepts to problems inside and outside of the classroom. By sharing our content through this website, we hope to make a contribution to the collection of open education resources that are helping to break down barriers to learning. Enjoy!

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of $43,939 for this project provided by the students of the UBC Vancouver campus via the TLEF. We also appreciate the support by UBC Studios, Learning Technology Hub (LT Hub), Canaccord Learning Commons (CLC), and the Centre for Teaching Learning and Technology (CTLT).