=Intro bookend=

Hi. 

Welcome to money 101, introduction to personal finance. 
My name is Daniel Folkinshteyn, I am a professor of finance at Rowan university, and I will be your guide through this series of video lectures on personal financial management.

In addition to whatever learning management system you may be using, these lectures have their own website, at finance-lectures.com, and you can also send me email if you'd like to share any feedback about this course.

=Learning objectives=

After this lesson, I hope you will be able to do the following:

* Explain the benefits of an online course
* Manipulate video playback speed in various user interfaces
* Describe the structure and operations of this course

and

* List major topic groups covered in this course

=Pros and cons of online learning=

An online course has a number of benefits. 
You can take advantage of multiple delivery methods - text, video, audio, various interactive activities. 
You are not constrained in time and space - you can watch videos in bed at midnight if you like, you don't have to physically go to a particular location at a particular time.
You can choose the speed and order of content delivery. Pause when you like, skip forward at will, take a break and come back later, it's all under your control.
Depending on the course, you can have the advantage of instant feedback and multiple formative assessments to keep track of your progress.

The big con of a self-paced online course is the inability to interact with the instructor or your classmates on a real-time basis. 
You can make up for it by looking things up on your own, or using email or discussion boards.

=Video control=

One technique that is particularly useful for informational videos is controlling video playback speed. It will serve you well in any video lecture course you might participate in in the future.
The average reading speed is approximately 200 words per minute, while the average rate of speech in american english is about 100 to 120 words per minute. So I personally find, when watching videos, that the rate of information transmission is way too slow for my taste. 
The good news is, that a lot of video playback softare provides playback speed controls. Let's examine some of these.

Here's the standard html5 video playback element in mozilla firefox. when you right click on the video, you can see a number of options at your disposal. The one of interest presently is the 'play speed' option group here. 
You can play the video at half speed, 1.5 times the speed, and twice the speed.
You can also save the video to disk with the save video as option.

If you find yourself on youtube, you can do something very similar. First, go to youtube.com/html5, and set your options to use the html5 player.
Then, when a video loads, you can click on the settings button, and you'll see the speed control dropdown where you can select a number of speed options.
Additionally, if you have a youtube video downloader extension, you will also see a download button below the video, where you'll see some options as far as the format and resolution in which to download.

If these don't look like very fine-grained playback speed controls, you're right, they aren't. To get more control over playback speed, you generally have to download the video file to disk and use desktop video player software.

Here is for example VLC media player.
In the playback menu item, you can see some speed control increments. The fine increment is 10% of base speed. The top right corner of the player displays the current speed selection, and you can change it at will.

=Logistics=

Now let's discuss other components of this course.
The course is organized in modules and lessons centered around the video lectures. 
Each lecture will start by presenting the learning objectives for the lesson, so you know exactly what to expect to learn from it. 
Throughout the lectures, I will embed short mini-quizzes, where I will encourage you to pause the video, and think about the question to come up with your answer, before proceeding with the rest of the lesson. 
When our discussion requires certain prerequisite knowledge, I point you at external references so that you can make sure you are familiar with the necessary material.
I will end each video with suggested future readings, so that those of you who wish to explore a topic in greater depth have a good starting point for doing so.
Groups of videos will also be associated with short assignments or problem sets. If you are doing this for credit, your instructor will probably present them to you via a learning management system. Even if you are not doing this for credit, these are a great self-assessment tool that I encourage you to take advantage of.

Finally, I reiterate my request for your comments and feedback about this course.

=Quiz 1=

And now it is time for our first embedded quiz.

Please take a minute and write down as many financial products and services as you can think of.
Seriously, do pause the video and actually do it. I'll wait. 

=Financial products and services=

Welcome back. Here's a brief list that I came up with.

You can see that finance is a pretty unavoidable part of modern life, so it's probably a good idea to know about some of these things. Just as you wouldn't want to go through life being unable to read, count, or use a computing device, you also don't want to bumble your way through important money decisions either.

It is my hope that we'll eventually touch on all of these topics at some point during this course.

We'll talk about cash management and various bank deposit products,
Investments and the associated services and service firms,
about credit and loans, and insurance and taxation.


=Quiz 2=

And now it is time for our next embedded quiz.
Please take a minute, pause the video, and find out who Warren Buffett is. Maybe by using your favorite search engine or something.

Welcome back. Now that you know who warren buffett is, namely one of the most famous and successful investors of all time, you know why it might pay dividends to listen up when he says something.

=Why I asked=

So I want to draw your attention to this quote. He said:
"I think the biggest mistake is not learning the habits of saving properly early. Because saving is a habit."

Throughout this course we'll talk about the many aspects of saving and money management, with a view toward developing some good financial habits.

=Additional reading=

If you have a hankering for some extra reading, I suggest "the power of habit: why we do what we do in life and business."

Because changing our savings habits is not as easy as it may seem, just as it is with any other habits we might have.

Thank you for your attention. I hope to see you in later videos.

=Attributions=