Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I’m getting ready for the 9th Annual Economics Teaching Conference later this week, in Austin. I’m doing two presentations, one Thursday morning on using cell phones in the classroom (i.e., Bring-Your-Own-Device audience response systems) and one Friday morning that is an Introduction to Team-Based Learning . If you’ll be there, come say hi!

I spent last Friday at the EconEd conference in Florida where I was part of a panel on ‘flipping the classroom’. The whole day was great, starting with the first session with Alex Tabarrok talking about “why online education works”. He had a lot of good points about the time and cost savings associated with online education but there was something that kept nagging at me. As I thought about it more, I realized that what was bugging me is also the main source of my general discomfort with most discussions about the benefits online education: those benefits largely seem to be tied to a model of education where ‘learning’ really just means ‘knowledge transfer’. That is, as far as I can tell, most of the time and cost savings of ‘online education’ are associated with moving lectures online, not necessarily any other aspect of the classroom learning experience. Now, sure, if a teacher is currently standing at the front of the room and talking to the students, then it absolutely makes se...