Sharing knowledge within and beyond EDHEC

What do you teach at EDHEC? What is your area of expertise?

I teach Valuation and Advanced Corporate Finance. Both of these courses are part of the EDHEC Masters of Science for the FE Track students based in Nice.

I also teach Advanced Corporate Finance to our Risk & Finance students.

My expertise lies in the intersection of Corporate Finance and Strategy. Some of my current research is focused on applications of textual analysis in finance, strategy, and accounting.

In October 2020, you decided to launch a YouTube Channel. What is it about?

It’s a platform mainly for sharing knowledge within and beyond our EDHEC community. The videos focus on topics related to Finance and Data Science. I created and manage the channel but it's really open to all and I welcome everyone within our community willing to share their knowledge.

This publicly available YouTube channel compliments a private Facebook group that I created last year. The Facebook group is only open to current and former EDHEC students interested in finance and currently we have about 900 members. It’s a very effective way to stay in contact with my current and former students, share and discuss news, get feedback from them, and also it is a platform where students can ask their questions to the whole community, share their experiences, and so on.  

Did the worldwide pandemic trigger the launch of your YouTube Channel? 

Yes, absolutely. I’ve had the idea of a channel in mind for several years, but the pandemic paved the way to actually launching it. Since we had to move to remote working and teaching, we got more comfortable with delivering knowledge online. And YouTube seemed to me to be an easy and efficient way of communicating online.

What do you hope to achieve?

I want to achieve two goals. One is related to me and my students. The primary goal was to put out extra material online that we had not discussed in class but would be useful for my students. I actually used to send some of these contents as documents to the students and asked them to read them but it turned out that they prefer it much more when I provide the same content in a video format. 

The nice thing is that with this public channel, I can share knowledge with my current students and the Alumni and hopefully with future students.

The second goal is hopefully to make an impact on people beyond our EDHEC community. I was glad to hear that some of the materials have been very useful for students in different schools and countries and that some professors outside France have asked their students to watch our videos. More importantly, I am very glad to see that there are people from other schools who kindly offer to share their knowledge within our platform.  So I hope that with the help of people within or closely related to our community, we can build a platform with useful materials that serve, a much bigger community than our own.

Does it help you interact more with your students during this difficult time?

Most of the interaction with my students as a community is via our Facebook group. However, the videos have definitely been an additional source of interaction during this time. For example, many students were closely following and coding simulations I was showing in some videos and we did discuss a lot of relevant materials together. In addition, I tried to motivate some of our students to be more involved in physical and mental activities during the time of confinement by posting some videos on the importance of these activities and challenging them. These are nothing big, but all I could do for my students and I will continue to do all I can for them.

What does it take to popularize some concepts and easily share concepts?

I would say it’s like teaching in general. It takes passion and open-mindedness. Passion is required to give you energy to happily work on the subject and open-mindedness because you have to listen to your audience’s feedback and adapt the delivery methods so it serves them best.