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Showing posts from September, 2012

Blended learning

Since the end of last spring, I've been kicking around the idea of listing my writing class as a 'hybrid' class - i.e., a class that meets partially online. There are already several weeks in the course where I 'cancel' one of the class meetings because students are working on drafts and reviews and there isn't really anything for us to talk about as a group. So instead of having class, I tell students they can come meet with me individually to discuss their writing. There are also some class days where I feel like we don't really need to be meeting, that it would be just as easy to accomplish what we are doing online. So it wouldn't be that big a stretch to formally move to a hybrid structure where we meet face-to-face once a week and the other class 'meeting' is online. My department is also in the process of developing policies for handling the development of online (including hybrid) classes. We had some discussion last year when a collea

Introducing high school students to economics

One of my service assignments this year is marketing the scholarships that my department offers. In particular, we have one scholarship that is potentially quite large (could more than cover tuition and fees) that the original donor wanted us to use specifically to attract good students into the major. But for the last few years, we have had hardly any applicants, and almost none from incoming freshmen. So my department agreed to devote some funds to have someone work on outreach to high schools. I volunteered, since it seemed like a good complement to my other interests and would give me an opportunity to connect with some high school economics teachers. Over the summer, I put together some materials about the scholarship and about economics in general, and started emailing people. So far, I've lined up a few visits to econ classes and also some AVID classes (for those who aren't familiar with it, AVID stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination and is a college readi

You know you're an economist when...

... you are at Sea World and when you see all the strollers 'parked' outside Shamu Stadium, your first thought is, "This would make a great example of product differentiation!" Tutor2U has some more pictures that could be used to show economic concepts, with this description of a cool assignment for your students: My first assignment for my AS Economics group this week is to get their smartphones or tablets out and in pairs find some time to explore our locality to shoot examples of economics around them. They then select six of their favourite images and turn them into a Prezi or a PowerPoint and explain to the group why their images raise interesting economics questions.