From the trading floor to the Strait of Hormuz

The Bloomberg for Education team came to De Montfort University recently to showcase their innovative data terminal. Find out what happened when teaching staff from our Business and Law Faculty got their hands on the platform for the day.

DMU recently welcomed the Bloomberg for Education team to the trading floor in our Hugh Aston building for a day focused on experiential, data‑informed learning. The visit gave academic colleagues across the Faculty of Business and Law an opportunity to explore how real‑time data, live market activity and global news can be embedded effectively into teaching.

The visit was the brainchild of Associate Head Education Irina Gokh. Alongside ‘brilliant’ colleagues Meryem Altaf and Mohannad Elmanaseer, Dr Gokh has been working with Bloomberg for Education for two years to integrate their platform into International Business teaching modules, demonstrating how it can be used as a live decision‑making environment.

The core of the day was a staff hackathon, where academic colleagues were given hands‑on access to the Bloomberg terminal and challenged to explore how it could support their own teaching practice. Colleagues worked collaboratively, moving in two hours from having limited or no familiarity with the platform to developing concrete ideas for learning activities they could take forward with their students.

Participants explored a wide range of Bloomberg functionality, including sustainability metrics, trade data, geopolitical developments, geographic insights and curated global news.

The hackathon was followed by a guest session, delivered by Gonçalo Santos, who leads university relations in Europe and Asia for Bloomberg for Education, and Kisumi Kan, Bloomberg Account Manager for DMU, which was open to colleagues from the faculty and wider university.

Bloomberg were challenged to step outside the financial applications of their platform to analyse the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz via the terminal, demonstrating to colleagues how it works and how broadly it can be applied.

Santos said:

“I think there is a misconception that Bloomberg is just for finance or for business. It is really good to see professors from other areas experimenting with our tools, demystifying Bloomberg and seeing that there is a greater impact to be had in many different courses and disciplines.”

Reflecting on the day, Dr Gokh said: 

“The event went better than we could have possibly imagined. Our idea was to close the gap between colleagues’ expertise and what Bloomberg could do for them. If you can close that gap, what you can leverage is absolutely unprecedented, because Bloomberg is unparalleled as a platform.

“For students, it’s really powerful. What it gives them is the ability to see the world for what it is to some extent, not something that was developed years ago but a live case study, and to be able to make live decisions out of it.”