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Technology UW Room Opens for Trading Students at the University of Washington Business School in Seattle will be able to track the upturning stock market for themselves at the school's new NASDAQ student trading room. Robert Greifeld, president and CEO of the NASDAQ stock market, was on hand for the official opening of the trading room last October. The new facility is the first col- lege-based trading room to open in the western United States, say school representatives. The room features a ticker showing stock prices; a display board running stock quotes from NASDAQ, Dow Jones terminals won't allow students to complete financial transactions, the space serves as both classroom and laboratory, where students access real-time data to manage portfolios and experience firsthand what mar- ket conditions make a company a winner or loser on Wall Street. "The trading room is akin to a chemistry & Co., and other data on continu- ous feed; two television monitors with live news coverage of financial markets from CNBC and CNNfn; and 12 trading stations. Each station is equivalent to a trading desk in a Wall Street firm, complete with dual computer screens, one of which pro- vides market data from Reuters. Although the room's computer exchange since the early 1930s, when the Northwest Commodities and Stock Exchange operated in its downtown. Bringing a trading room back adds "a realistic dimension to the classes we teach about risk man- agement and futures and options," says Jefferson Duarte, a UW assis- tant professor of finance and former Wall Street bond trader. The new trading room was par- or physics lab," says Vance Roley, UW professor of finance and associ- ate dean for academic and faculty affairs in the business school. Seattle has not had a stock tially funded by a $250,000 grant from the NASDAQ Stock Market Educational Foundation. TOOLS OF THE TRADE LearnTrac and PocketClassroom Designed for Interactive Learning Handheld computers are quickly becoming a staple of the business world—and now they're on their way to becoming a mainstay in the classroom. eLearning Dynamics, a company based in Washington, D.C., has designed two software prod- ucts to create an interactive classroom. LearnTrac (for the Palm operating system) and Pocket- Classroom (for Pocket PCs) allow students to respond electronically to quizzes, polls, and discussion questions via wireless PDAs. The data is then transmitted immediately to instructors' computers, indicating how each student re- sponded and what percentage of students answered correctly. "The software offers educators tools such as instant mes- saging and 'test wizards' that allow them to develop quizzes spontaneously in the classroom and receive responses back in ways that traditional methods simply do not permit," says Chase Weir, chairman and co-founder of eLearning Dynamics. There is a widely held misperception that software such as LearnTrac and PocketClassroom "replaces hand-raising," Weir remarks. In re- sponse, he points out that these learning tools actually increase student attentive- ness and participation. "Most students probably won't get called on in a lecture with 100 or more students, even if they know the answer to a question," says Weir. "With this soft- 50 BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2004 ware, the professor has a powerful tool to determine effortlessly whether each student has read the homework assignment and is paying attention. You have 100 percent participation." The software also allows professors to ask open-ended questions and receive a response from each student for dis- cussion. It includes features that account for timing, allowing students to respond if they think they know the answer or when they've finished a particular problem. LearnTrac and PocketClassroom already are in use at the Bryan School of Business and Economics at the Univer- sity of North Carolina at Greensboro, which received 40 handheld computers contributed by Palm. Such software, says Don Sowers, the first instructor to test the program at the university level, may eventually change how instruc- tors approach the classroom. "It will replace many of the things we do and help us do some things differently. With LearnTrac, I know instantly how well students are learning the material. Otherwise it would be weeks into class, after the first test, before I knew how they were doing," says Sowers. "As educators, we are really trying to teach and engage our students in the learning process, and this is a tool to help us do our jobs better."