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Associate Professor Elias Rantapuska from theDepartment of Finance of the School of Business familiarised himself with the flipped classroom teaching philosophy in which students work on provided exercises before the lectures. Now he implements some elements of the philosophy in his teaching. As a topic of finance studies, valuation is very practical, and many of its approaches can be justified by other means than pure finance theory alone. Rantapuska realised that combining “flipping” with valuation could be effective. Soon after this realisation, he and designer Henri Blomster started to develop a video series for the bachelor-level Finance studies course Capstone: Valuation. The videos include interviews with professionals who are at varying career stages and perform various duties, but who all work with practical valuation. In the videos, they are asked how they perform valuation in practice.

‘I interviewed nine experts who have already won their spurs and work in different roles. The experts include, for example, industrial company and investment bank representatives, a private equity investor, an angel investor and a business management consultant. After the interviews, our project team compiled short, thematic videos in which the views of different experts are presented through a dialogue of sorts’, says Henri Blomster. 

Excellent additional teaching material which does not replace actual dialogue

The purpose of the project was to produce videos on the “science and art” of valuation to be used as learning material in a final stage bachelor’s degree course via the MyCourses learning environment. The videos are shared to students in compliance with the flipped classroom method which means that the students can decide when to watch them. The videos complement the actual lectures and are excellent sources of information for anyone interested in the topic.

According to Elias Rantapuska, short videos provide an effective channel for sharing information as commercial video platforms have made people accustomed to being able to watch short clips with mobile devices regardless of time and place.

‘Videos are most suitable for instructional purposes when the topic can discussed in a summarised form. For a university, the added value is generated by inducing people to think, meet and communicate. However, videos cannot replace complete lessons which utilise interaction between people’, says Rantapuska.

A skilled team working towards a clear objective

Elias Rantapuska tells that before starting the project, one of the key tasks was to create a clear vision that would explain what the project’s objective was, what kind of end result was expected and whose help would be needed to carry out the project.

‘In this project, we had a Finnish viewpoint as the experts we interviewed work in Finland. As the project turned out well, I started to think that maybe we should have added an international perspective as well. We could have made a couple of interviews also in London, for example. With the international perspective we could have made a cross-border comparison on valuation practices. After all, most of the largest valuation projects, such as corporate acquisition valuations, are performed outside of Finland’, Rantapuska explains.

The project group comprised talented and committed Aalto colleagues whom Rantapuska praises for their enormous contribution.

‘Henri Blomster made the interviews and edited the video content. People at the Aalto Studios unit also helped us a lot. The videos were shot by Learning Services ICT Specialist Kalle Kataila who is extensively experienced in producing various kinds of videos to support instruction. Sofia Bonds was responsible for the technical video editing. Helena Bäckman and Yulia Guseva took care of the production.’

Link to videos: