Learner Reviews & Feedback for Financial Engineering and Risk Management Part I by Columbia University

The content of the course looked promising. But then I took a first look: the instructor is reading formulas from a slide. This is missing the whole point of a online class. There is no motivation for the formulars, no context why they are important. And from a learning point of view the course is very hard to follow. No real advantage compared to reading a book on that matter.

I just took the "Economics of Money and Banking course", which is one of the best courses I ever attended (personally in class or online). There are other great courses on Coursera. And for easy introduction to some of the concepts Khan University courses are unmatched in accessability.

Too bad that this course doesn't match up to the above examples. The topics would deserve that they are presented in a way that they can be understood by a wide audience.

This class is a total waste of time and money.

1-The presenter's English is not up to code, so to speak.

2-The examples are purely theoretical and lack any kind of real numbers. Greek characters proliferate unnecessarily, adding to confusion.

3-The course materials make no effort to explain formulas in a clear and concise manner.

Don't waste your time and money like I did.

not sure about the whole course, but the week 1 training video is basically an instructor reading a script.

Too difficult to understand for a beginner.

There is no posssilbe way to pass the quizes/tests by watching the lectures. You need to find many outside resources to learn the material. Some of the quiz question principles are not even touched on in lectures. This should be considered a self study course. Also if you want to buy or use a text book to learn the material be prepared to spend $200 + otherwise good luck. The only redeeming feature is the forums.

I think the way it is taught is not very insightful, the lecturers clearly just read a script and make it difficult to follow. They assignment questions are often hard to understand. Most importantly, there is very little about the actual mechanism behind pricing financial instruments, instead they just state the formula.

This subject is not as complicated as it made out to be in these videos. CFA material explains it in a much simpler way. I had to depend on CFA material to really understand what is being explained here.

I appreciate how this course not only discusses the concepts in technical detail, but actually delves into the mathematics of the subject matter, and teaches how to actually do the actual work inv

Challenging course but I've really got a good sense of the mechanics of main financial instruments such as bonds, options, futures, swaptions, etc. Being able to do all the exercises in Excel is pretty convenient. Exercises are difficult because there is no feedback - it's either right or wrong.

This course is amazing. The structure is very clear and coherent. It is very mathematically focused and the models are interesting. I would always recommend this course to my colleagues.

Curso voltado para a precificação de ativos diversos, como ações fundos, swaps, etc... Houveram poucos exemplos durante as aulas, o que torna as provas bem difíceis. No início, vemos coisas próximas da nossa realidade, mas, depois da 3° ou 4° semana de curso, a entramos em um leque de ativos pouquíssimo conhecidos e utilizados na nossa realidade.

Help on topics is very limited. Nothing more than instruction videos. Discussion forums are helpful only to solve assignments. There is hardly any input from instructor about genuine theoretical questions.

It is not a recommended course, when they explain something they assume that we are expert and we know all what they are talking about, they need to have statistics experts which is not mentioned in course prerequisite.

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I recommend to review the material and to review the purpose of this course

Very helpful and very well taught course. Felt a bit short. I wish it also touched upon stochastic models for option pricing and stochastic calculus in its week 8 syllabus. Thank you for the course, overall it was a nice experience.

This course effectively provides an introductory overview of the basic concepts in financial engineering world (arbitrage, discounting, fair pricing etc). I would have prefer more mathematical insight, but indeed the use of basic mathematical tools was pointed out as intentional in the course presentation. Exercises at the end of each module are really helpful to clarify the concepts exposed during the lessons. Considering the limited amount of hours devoted to such complex arguments, this course fulfills its promises.

The course is very elementary and basic. It should be a good intro 101 for those who have never studied mathematical finance. You can also practice using Excel if you have never used it before. It could be more challenging and fun if there were more modeling questions.

The instructor didn't make the his lesson easy to follow. The lecture materials were not reader-friendly.

The teacher in the first few weeks is hard to follow; it sounds like he reads from a paper and he barely writes anything on the slides. It sounds like every sentence he says is crucial to understand, which is hard to follow. The other teacher does a much better job at this. The course would also greatly benefit with exercise material so you get a better feeling of calculating these things.

course needs problems with explanations and/or better feedback on quizzes. there is no way to tell what error one has made - it could even be rounding. a student forum might be helpful, too.

application of some formulas is not clear, leading to errors on quizzes. in some cases I have used external resources to give me a way to achieve the correct result

I find far too theoretical, too dry; no examples, no exercise guidelines. It's almost having someone reading the slides to you. Still useful for someone like me that never done financial engineering, to find all the concepts in one place. Hence the two stars as oppose to one.

Classes have a few numerical examples.

The teachers don't have didactics, they just read the slides.

Low quality slides. Monotone lecturing style.

The explanations are not clear and only a few exercises presented in the quiz were covered in the course videos. There is no exercise book to prepare for the exercise of the quiz.

No help was granted during the practice of the course. I din't find the course helpful for future growth in a company as company doesn't consider it to be as professional.

I think that the simply reading slides doesn't help people understand. The idea is to make this courses as accessible as possible.