Options, Ideas, & Facilitation Tips
Since the Student Money Management Center has been facilitating online financial education for several years, we have a lot of digital content we can share.
Online Financial Education Options
Below is a short list of what the Student Money Management Center currently has available or planned.
Get Savvy: Grow Your Green Stuff webinar series
Previous recordings available at on our YouTube Channel.
Use the Get Savvy Registration Form to register for upcoming webinars:
- Health Insurance Dissected – Tuesday, April 7 at 12 PM CST
- Student Loan Repayment – Wednesday, April 22 at 12 PM CST
Financial Literacy Digital Badges Program
An overview of the 5 courses in this program and how to enroll is available on the Badges web page.
University of Illinois System students & employees can actively participate in the course, but we are still working on a public option for enrollment. If you’re interested in being enrolled manually, please email studentmoney@uillinois.edu.
Ideas for Facilitating Financial Education
Kahoot "Challenges"
These were originally set up as something that an SMMC partner could do when we were not available physically, but there is an option to set up a “challenge” that can be shared virtually with students as homework.
Tweet Chats
In the past, we have done weekly tweet-chats. This may be something we re-implement using archived tweet chat questions. Some examples of content topics we've done in the past include:
- Basics of Banking
- Choosing a Dwelling
- Credit 101
- D is for Debt
- Healthy Living
- How to Have the Money Talk
- Identity Theft
- Job Benefits
- Navigating Tax Season
- Organize Your Finances
- Psychology of Money
- Working as a Student
This is a short list, but there's a lot of opportunity to expand on these topics and more in future online discussions. Subscribe to our e-newsletters, follow us on social media, and check our website often for updates to potential online programming, like tweet chats, in the future!
Livestreams & Stories
Last year, we also did two different live series/campaigns on social media. We did a series called “Graduating: What Now?” across facebook and instagram every business day in April 2019, and we did a series during summer of 2019 using our Cash at College content for Instagram lives and stories each week.
Facilitation Tips
If you’re planning to facilitate synchronous online programs, especially a webinar, here are some suggestions:
- Have 2 presenters to increase engagement and make the presentation more conversational
- Have at least 1 person monitor the chat and respond to questions in real time
- Don’t try to get too fancy with using features of the software at first.
- Focus on making content appealing and including thought-provoking questions that are still easy to answer in a chat feature.
- Open chat supports engagement better than a closed chat in our opinions, though that really depends on how you facilitate your programs
- Mute participants to reduce confusion and set ground rules for how to enjoy the content at the beginning of your presentation
Feel free to email us with questions at studentmoney@uillinois.edu.
We will continue to update this blog with new virtual resources as we tidy them up for wider distribution.
