With COVID-19 disrupting the traditional learning environment, Advanced Graduate Business Certificate faculty member Perry Beaumont, Ph.D. is using his extensive cloud computing and remote instruction experience to aid hundreds of educators in underserved areas across the country as an Amazon Web Services Educate Ambassador.
“We’re helping bring resources to high school teachers and university professors by offering guidance and brainstorming to help students by adapting to this new environment,” Beaumont said.
Beaumont hosts Office Hours that give educators a chance to ask any questions that have come up in relation to remote learning.
“Everything from ‘How can I set up a chat room for my students?’ to ‘Can you suggest a specific data platform to do an assignment?’ or ‘Do you suggest they work individually or in teams?’” Beaumont said. “There is no question too basic or too complex.”
Beaumont has also recorded a webinar that can be accessed any time on the topic of data science and creative ways to bring the topic of data science into the classroom.
“We’re really trying to democratize and broadly disseminate the many different things that are available that people may not have thought about before,” Beaumont said.
A key tenet of Beaumont’s teaching style is bringing as many real-world contexts into the classroom as possible. As a lecturer at SPS, Beaumont uses real-time insights from his work as Head of Data Science at Distinguished Programs, and is constantly looking to bring modern business issues into the mix when teaching his Security Analysis course.
“Today, there are so many excellent and freely-available data platforms and analytics platforms for students to learn how to use that will be applicable in almost any industry,” Beaumont said. “I actively try to bring those into homework assignments and teaching as well.”
In the past, Beaumont has brought a Bloomberg Terminal into the classroom and used Amazon Web Services cloud computing modules to craft assignments that allow students to create a database, analyze data and use the module to parse that data. This experience sets his students apart when they’re looking for jobs.
“The emails I get from students is that these skills really differentiate them by having learned it in the context of something real,” Beaumont says.
In addition to his work at SPS and with AWS Educate Ambassadors, Beaumont recently published a book with prescient resources for those pursuing finance who are looking for digital resources.
“Digital Finance,” Beaumont’s third text, was published with Routledge Press late last fall.
“There are core fundamental elements of finance that will be bedrock principles, like reading a balance sheet or valuing a company, but I felt there was a need for a companion textbook to bring people up to date with all the other things going on in the finance world that were more technology-oriented,” Beaumont said. “This text covers all things digital happening today within financial services, insurance and even real estate.”
Beaumont is a lecturer in the Advanced Graduate Certificate in Business program. You can learn more about that offering here.
