Wednesday, June 10, 2009

New degree course in e-Finance

My interest in this new degree programme dates back to just under a year ago, when my head of department asked me to be in charge of setting it up. Luckily, various colleagues at CS and University of Liverpool Management School (ULMS) are also involved, this is not the sort of thing you want to do on your own.

So, it's a 3-year undergraduate course to be taught jointly with ULMS, and it was formally approved a couple of weeks ago. Here is a link that has recently shown up, actually I should get some minor errors fixed in some of the information it contains.
I did not blog about it in case something went horribly wrong with the approval process (approval processes are there to make us resist the urge to set up degree programmes without due care and consideration); we have been under time pressure to get it started up for this September.

Background: lots of students at XJTLU (Liverpool's partner university in China) spend their first 2 years over there and then another 2 years over here. There are about 20 of them who will want to take this new course. Starting in 2010 we will accept new students (mainly UK and EU) to start in year 1 of the course; we don't know how many students it will attract but the students coming from China are enough to justify setting it up.

There is more work to be done, includes setting up a new taught module in CS (probably to be titled "electronic markets") but I'm happy we got the degree approved in time for the first cohort of XJTLU students. Credit must go to Ullrich Hustadt (CS dept expert on XJTLU, and on setting up new degrees) and Frank Steffen (main contact at ULMS). This degree should help to develop further collaborations between the two departments.

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