- The water contamination issue in West Virginia sounds terrible for those living in the area but it’s a gold mine for econ teachers! In addition to the obvious implications for teaching externalities and regulation, you could also use this Marketplace interview with the owner of a chain of grocery stores as a jumping-off point to talk about price controls and shortages, or demand for complements and substitutes.
- Mark Maier and I have set up a site and blog to accompany our book, The Data Game: Controversies in Social Science Statistics. In addition to a help page for instructors, we’ll be posting relevant links and examples from current events. If you teach any type of statistics course or other course that uses data, check it out!
- James Tierney’s site Teach Me Econ has some great ideas for teaching economics. He also does a podcast series about the economics classroom; the most recent is an interview with Eric Chiang, the author of the latest edition of the CoreEconomics textbook (and if you haven’t seen Eric’s Around the World in 80 Hours videos, they are pretty cool!)
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...
Thanks for the shout out and thank you more for joining me today!
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