I have been trying to think of good, practical examples of marginal analysis that I can use with my students (unlike many economists I know, I don't think it makes any sense to explain to students that 'if the movie stinks, you should get up and leave' - it might be the utility-maximizing thing to do but it's just too big a jump from human nature to be useful for teaching). EconomistMom may have a more useful example - she points out that when the marginal benefits from something (in this case, straightening out one's teeth) accrue over a lifetime, those benefits are automatically higher for a kid simply because they have more lifetime left. Economistmom goes on to talk about the implications for social policy (e.g., spending money on education versus cutting inheritance taxes); this could get into some nuances about investment vs. consumption but I think her point is a powerful one.
As someone who has worked hard to build a lot of interactivity into my courses, I have never been interested in teaching fully online courses, in part because I have felt that the level of engaged interaction could never match that of a face-to-face class (not that there aren't some exceptional online courses out there; I just have a strong preference for the in-person connection). But the current situation is not really about building online courses that are 'just as good' as our face-to-face courses; it is about getting through this particular moment without compromising our students' learning too much. So if you are used to a lot of interaction in your F2F class, here are some options for adapting that interaction for a virtual environment: [NOTE: SDSU is a Zoom/mostly Blackboard campus so that's how I've written this but I am pretty sure that other systems have similar functionality] If you use clickers in class to break up what is otherwise mostly lect...
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