AI-first learning · piloting at Shidler College of Business
Learn finance and economics the way you'll practice them.
Kumu pairs your professor's actual course materials with an AI tutor that coaches instead of answering for you, interactive labs that compute like the real Excel models, and stage-by-stage guides for graded project work. Not a generic tutorial site — your course, made interactive.
What's different here
Kumu coaches, it doesn't cheat
The tutor on every page knows which stage you're on. It explains concepts fully, critiques your reasoning, and walks worked examples — but it won't write your graded memo, spec, or analysis. That's the same line your syllabus draws.
Compute like the real model
Each lab runs the same math as the Excel workbook it accompanies — same conventions, same validation checks, same answers. Drag a slider until the intuition lands, then open the spreadsheet already knowing what every formula should produce.
Built around graded work
Each stage page carries the deliverable, an interactive submission checklist that remembers your progress, and a quick quiz — so you know you're ready before the deadline, not after the grade posts. Weights and dates stay on your syllabus, where they belong.
Subjects
Kumu is organized by subject, not course code — the same material serves any school's offering. If your syllabus sent you here, it linked the subject you need; if you arrived on your own, pick by what you are studying.
Student Onboarding
Before any course: set up GitHub, meet your AI tutor, tell it how you want to work, and start the professional portfolio — bio, resume, and the AI toolkit you'll carry into your career.
International Corporate Finance
The Performance Ratios project: 6 stages from standing up a public portfolio repo to critically evaluating an LLM's financial analysis of a company you choose.
International Finance & Securities
The FX Hedging project: frame a multi-million euro exposure, spec the hedge model, have an AI build it, load live market data, and validate the whole chain before making the CFO call — 6 stages, Design → Build → Validate.
Micro & Macro Economics
One graded case-study engagement, two optional ones, and a team case study, tracing one arc — a price taker with no power over price, a patent holder who sets it, and a market where the profit turns out to be somebody else's rent. Plus live supply-and-demand and farm-profit labs.
International Economics & Trade
The import-a-product team project: source it on Alibaba, price it against Amazon, brand it with a real design system, survive the tariff, and sell it to your classmates — 2 milestones, AI + GitHub throughout.
More Finance & Econ subjects
Financial statements & ratios for undergraduates, and beyond — the plan is a comprehensive Finance & Economics tutorial library, subject by subject, then topic by topic, at any school.
How the AI tutor works (and its limits)
Honest by design
Kumu is an LLM — it can be wrong, especially about specific numbers. The course teaches you to
treat every AI output as a draft to verify against the source annual report, and the tutor will
keep reminding you of that. Log meaningful AI sessions in your prompt-log.md; that
habit is graded from Stage 4 onward.
During this pilot the tutor runs in bring-your-own-key mode: click the ✳ button, open ⚙ settings, and paste an Anthropic API key (stored only in your browser). In the full product this moves server-side and disappears entirely.
The in-page Kumu chat isn't switched on for your cohort yet — it arrives later in the pilot. Everything else here works without it: the stage guides, labs, quizzes, and checklists. In the meantime, use your own AI (Claude, ChatGPT) the same way — coach, don't copy — and log meaningful sessions in your prompt log.