Skip to main content

Designing a course

After a few weeks of catching up on referee reports and other projects that I should have done a long time ago but ignored because of classes, plus simply some much-needed piddling, I'm back in the teaching saddle and starting to design the new course I'll be teaching in the fall.

Most economists (and, I assume, many other University professors) rarely actually purposely design courses. That is, a lot of professors start out as teaching assistants during graduate school, which usually means we just do whatever the professor we're working for tells us to do. When we move on to teaching our own classes, if it's a course for which we T.A.'ed, then we just follow whatever the professor we worked for did in that course. If it's a new course, we find other people who have taught the course and ask them for help, which amounts to getting their syllabus and maybe old assignments and exams. Once in a blue moon, someone might develop a course that hasn't really been offered much before (like a specialized course on the economics of some area of the world, or the course for teachers that I created two years ago), but the vast majority of economics topics courses are 'standard' in that if you go to any other university, there will be a course with the same name and similar content, and all the textbooks include generally the same stuff, and you can almost always find someone who can tell you how they taught it so you don't have to start from scratch. Once you've taught a course a few times, you may make improvements and adjustments but I think it's really rare for someone to step back and completely re-think a course from the ground up.

But this summer, that's basically what I'm doing. Actually, since I haven't taught the course before myself, I guess I'm not "re"-thinking but I am stepping back and trying to design the course clearly, from the beginning, rather than just relying on what others have done. This is partly because this is not really a standard course in economics - it's a data and statistics course that my department created about a decade ago when it was clear that econometrics was too much for most of our majors but we wanted them to have more experience with data than they were getting in lower-division stats courses. So the idea is to give the students lots of hands-on practice with finding, manipulating, analyzing and presenting data, mostly using Excel. There may be similar courses at other universities (and if you happen to teach in a place that has one, please let me know!), but there isn't really a "standard" way to teach it, other than following what my colleagues have done previously.

What's scary is that I have never taught anything remotely resembling statistics, so I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking when I volunteered to take this on. But the general concept - i.e., that students should have a better understanding of how economists (as well as the rest of the world) use data - is one that I believe in strongly. Similar to writing well, I think that understanding data and statistics is a skill that not only gives students a competitive advantage in the workplace but the very process of developing that skill can help them think more like economists. So although I'm sort of clueless about how to teach a lot of the statistical tools (and am apparently going to have to finally bite the bullet and start using Office 2007), I'm really excited about this opportunity to think about the bigger picture and how to get students engaged in the ways in which economists use data and statistics. I'm sure that you, lucky readers, will be hearing a lot about it along
the way...

Comments

  1. On designing a course, have you seen http://www.deefinkandassociates.com/GuidetoCourseDesignAug05.pdf ? I suspect that many do much of it, but it really helps to have it explicitly laid out.

    Note that he's also involved with "Team-Based Learning."

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments that contribute to the discussion are always welcome! Please note that spammy comments whose only purpose seems to be to direct traffic to a commercial site will be deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

What are the costs?

I came across an interesting discussion about a 19-year-old intern who was fired from The Gazette in Colorado Springs for plagiarism. There appears to be some controversy over the fact that the editor publicly named the girl in a letter to readers (explaining and apologizing for the plagiarism), with some people saying that doing so was unduly harsh because this incident will now follow her for the rest of her career. I was intrigued by this discussion for two reasons - one, it seems pretty clear to me that this was not a case of ignorance (as I have often encountered with my own students who have no idea how to paraphrase or cite correctly) and two, putting aside the offense itself, I have often struggled with how to handle situations where there are long-term repercussions for a student, repercussions that lead the overall costs to be far higher than might seem warranted for the specific situation. As an example of the latter issue, I have occasionally taught seniors who need to p

What was your high school economics experience like?

As I mentioned in my last post , I am asking my Econ for Teachers students to reflect on their reading by responding to discussion prompts. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to share my thoughts on those issues here and see if anyone wants to chime in. For this week, the students were asked to read the California and national content standards , an article by Mark Schug and others about why social science teachers dread teaching economics and how to overcome the dread, an article by William Walstad on the importance of economics for understanding the world around us and making better personal decisions (with some evidence on the dismal state of economic literacy in this country), and another article by Walstad on the status of economic education in high schools (full citations below). The reflection prompt asks the students to then answer the following questions: What was your high school econ experience like? What do you remember most from that class? How do

When is an exam "too hard"?

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu