Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

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...

This is the first of a series of three guest posts from Mary McGlasson of Chandler-Gilbert Community College. PART I: What possessed me to undertake this video project? Let me introduce myself – I am Dr. Mary McGlasson, Economics faculty (and faculty developer for emerging technologies) at Chandler-Gilbert Community College, one of ten sister colleges in the Maricopa District. Our college serves about 14,000 students annually, and student learning is at the heart of all that we do. One strategy that we have taken with our Economics courses is to offer a wide variety of modalities – traditional (16 week, face-to-face), compressed (8 week, face-to-face), online, and hybrid (a mix of face-to-face and online) – for students to choose from. Seven years ago, I agreed to offer our college’s first hybrid Economics class. How hard could it be? After all, my face-to-face classes were already web-enhanced, heavily using the features of the Learning Management System (Blackboard, at the ti...

In the past, I have regularly used Discussion Boards (within the Blackboard LMS) to have students post reflections or questions related to assigned readings. But I've really only used the Discussion Board tool because there was no better alternative; I've never been a big fan of the interface. The threads just seem clunky and I don't think students actually read what other students post unless I specifically assign them to do so. So now that my university has updated to Blackboard 9, which has blogs, wikis and journals, I'm considering using one or more of these options instead. While wikis are specifically for collaborative creation of a common product, blogs and journals allow students to write individual posts or comments. From what I can tell, the main difference between Blackboard's blogs and journals seems to be that journals are intended to be private; students write entries that are only visible to the instructor (although there is an option to make the e...

Last year, I wrote a lot about my experience with SWoRD , a site that facilitates peer review of writing (including generating grades from peer review scores). Although I think there are a lot of neat things about SWoRD, there were also a lot of problems and I decided not to use it for the writing class this past spring. Instead, I used Turnitin's PeerMark tool, which is integrated into my school's Blackboard system. Compared to last year, I made a few adjustments to the writing and reviewing process. The general pattern was that students would submit first drafts on Mondays, by class time; those papers would be made available to reviewers at the end of a two-hour grace period (i.e., class started at 3:30pm and papers were available to reviewers at 5:30pm so slightly late papers could still get reviewed without messing up any of the assignments) and reviews were due by class time on Wednesday (again with a two-hour grace period). Depending on the assignment, students revi...

On Tuesday, I got to spend the day learning about various aspects of assessment, at SDSU's One Day in May symposium.  So much good stuff! Although I think of myself as relatively savvy about a lot of tools, and a definite data junky, I got lots of ideas about things I could be doing to track analytics in Blackboard and Google Docs. I haven't been a huge Google Docs user so I had no clue that there are so many cool things you can do with spreadsheet gadgets (like create word clouds or interactive timelines, a la Gapminder ). The day got me thinking about how I could use certain tools and I started looking for new ways to deal with one of my most time-consuming tasks. I have a couple different situations where I collect information from students that I want to pass on to other students (e.g., team peer evaluations in the data class or reviewer back evaluations in the writing class). Currently, the way I do that is either through emailing each student or putting the informati...

As I mentioned at the end of my last post , SWoRD does provide an infrastructure that makes it easier to have students do peer review - students can submit papers electronically, the system can randomly assign multiple anonymous reviewers, I can create specific comment prompts so reviewers must give both numeric and open-ended comments, and students can back evaluate the reviews to indicate how helpful they were (or weren't). Given that I am a firm believer in the value of the peer review process overall, I would perhaps continue to use SWoRD if there were no other options that could serve the same function. But if I'm not going to use the grades generated by SWoRD (or if I need to do a lot of work to make those grades work for me), then I do have other options. Each would require some tweaking to do exactly what I want to do but from what I can tell, they all provide some advantages over SWoRD as well. Please note that I have not yet actually used any of the three tools I ment...

I really should have gotten back to this sooner but for those who are wondering how things went with SWoRD , the peer review writing site I used with my writing class in the spring, my overall reaction is that while it might be useful for some people, I probably won't use it the next time around. For those who missed my earlier posts, I discussed the basics of SWoRD , whether SWoRD can replace instructor grading , and some first reactions to SWoRD's reviewing process (after the first assignment) back in March. I made some tweaks as the semester progressed but overall, I have to say the experience was still pretty rough. To briefly recap, SWoRD is an online peer review system where 1) students upload their papers, 2) the system randomly assigns other students to anonymously review those papers, 3) peer reviewers give both open-ended comments and numeric ratings in response to instructor-generated prompts, 4) authors 'back evaluate' their reviews, which means they give...

If you've read my last few posts about PollEverywhere with skepticism (or skipped them entirely) because you just can't imagine ever letting students use their cell phones in class, my question for you is WHY NOT? Or more specifically, is your aversion to cell phones driven by concerns about helping good students or reining in bad students? By 'good' and 'bad', I'm not talking about those who get good and bad grades; I'm talking about those who care about learning, who want to be there, and those who don't. I've been thinking a lot lately about how much I tend to focus on the latter group, and how often I tend to forget about the former group, and how backward that is... "Students will cheat" For example, I know that for some teachers, the biggest problem with a service like PollEverywhere is concerns that students will use their phones to cheat. At a meeting to discuss options for a new clicker vendor for our campus, a few facult...

[This post wraps up my reflections on my pilot of PollEverywhere this past spring. If you missed my last two posts, I discussed how I used PollEverywhere in my data analysis course, and student reaction to it.] So here are my general thoughts on PollEverywhere, particularly relative to standard clickers: Advantages Convenience for students . They all have cell phones so they never 'forget' their device the way they do with clickers. Easy to ask open-ended questions . Even on clicker systems that have this feature, it is generally easier with cell phones/laptops. Relatively low-cost . If you have fewer than 30 students, the service would be totally free; if you need to track more responses, there is a cost for a PE account that someone (you, your institution, or the students) will have to bear. For students who do not have unlimited texting, there may be costs related to sending/receiving messages; the total cost will depend on how many questions you ask (in a previou...

In my last post , I described how I used PollEverywhere in my data analysis course this spring. In this post, I'll discuss student reaction to PollEverywhere; in my next post, I'll wrap up with my own impressions and thoughts/suggestions for others who are considering using it in their classes. At the end of the semester, I surveyed my students about a number of aspects of using PollEverywhere. SDSU's Instructional Technology Services asks all clicker-using faculty to administer the same survey every semester and I adapted most of those questions for PE. Many of those questions aren't really about the specific technology but are about using any kind of response system (e.g., "Clickers/PollEverywhere usage helps me to remember course content"). I discussed student responses to clickers a couple years ago and reactions haven't changed much (if anything, the percentages of students agreeing with most of the statements has increased); reactions to PE on tho...

Months ago, I mentioned that I was part of an ITS pilot of PollEverywhere this past spring. Quick reminder: PollEverywhere is a web-based service where anyone can create a multiple-choice or open-ended question and people can respond via text, Twitter or website. I first used PollEverywhere in the fall when I wanted a way for my teams to submit open-ended responses. The free version only allows up to 30 responses per poll which was fine for 13 team responses but wouldn't work for individual responses (since I have 75 students in each of my sections) so I used clickers for any individual responses. In the spring, the University bought a PE account subscription so there could be unlimited responses. It also meant that students could register and their responses were recorded so I could use PollEverywhere as a replacement for clickers. In this post, I'll explain the mechanics of how I used PollEverywhere and some of the associated pluses and minuses. In my next couple posts, I...

I've always been a semi-early adopter of technology. I'm not a fanatic about it; I'm just sort of fascinated by the internet, by the ability we now have to reach people we never could in the past, and I like playing around with stuff. Back in college, I would 'chat' with friends via the VAX (I think that's what it was called), and in grad school I learned some html so I could create a personal webpage with lots of random stuff on it. I was actually excited when our campus started using Blackboard because it was easier to post my class stuff there than on the webpages I created on my own. And as the number of tech and web-based communication tools has exploded, I've explored a bunch of them, as I've written about here a lot. But even though I think technology is a wonderful thing, when it comes to teaching, I don't think I use technology just for technology's sake. Rather, I'd say that when I'm faced with a problem, I tend to look to te...

[If you missed them, I discussed the basics of SWoRD and whether SWoRD can replace instructor grading in earlier posts. I also have a follow-up post in August] In addition to generating a writing grade from students' numeric rubric scores, SWoRD also generates a reviewing grade. My understanding is that a student's reviewing grade is based half on that student's 'consistency' and half on the 'helpfulness' of that student's comments. The consistency score accounts for whether a student is differentiating among papers - if a student gives all high scores or all low scores, or if a student's scores differ from the other scores for the same papers, then the consistency score will be reduced (this also affects how much weight that student's scores are given in the writing score of the reviewed papers). The helpfulness score comes from 'back evaluations' that reviewees complete. The back evaluations are numeric scores on a five-point scale...

As I mentioned , I'm using SWoRD in my writing class for econ majors. SWoRD is a site that not only facilitates peer review, it allows for student grades to actually be determined by their classmates' reviews. For each assignment, the instructor creates both open-ended comment prompts and a numeric rubric (the SWoRD template requires a 1 to 7 scale, though you can sort of get around that by skipping some of the numbers). Students submit their papers to SWoRD and once the deadline has passed, papers are assigned to peer reviewers (minimum of three, maximum of six; the creators of SWoRD strongly recommend at least five reviews if the scores will be used for grading). Everything is anonymous, as each student creates a pseudonym within the system (you just have to make sure students don't put their names in the text of their files!). I can either assign specific reviewers or have the system automatically assign them randomly. After the reviews are completed, the authors have t...

I've been using clickers for several semesters now and I can't imagine teaching without them. But one drawback has always been that I can only ask multiple-choice questions. When I teach 500 students, I don't see any other option (at least for things where students' answers will count toward their grade in some way). But this semester, I have had a few application exercises in the data class where I wanted groups to come up with short responses to open-ended questions. I have thirteen teams in one section and ten in the other so grading their responses is not a big deal but I had to figure out how to collect them. One of the tenets of TBL applications is that teams should report simultaneously - easy enough with responses to multiple-choice questions (either with clickers or cards) but more difficult with longer responses. I ended up using Poll Everywhere , a very cool site that allows anyone to create a multiple-choice or open-ended poll and people can respond via ...

Twitter just announced a new feature that allows anyone, even those without Twitter accounts, to get someone's tweets via text. I immediately thought about using this for my students - I can create a Twitter account for each class/course and then students can choose to get reminders via text by texting (for example) "follow @Econ301" to 40404 (it's not 100% clear to me whether the @ sign is needed or not - the Twitter blog doesn't include it, this ReadWriteWeb post does). The reason I like this so much is that I've always thought this would be a great use of Twitter but I didn't want to force students to get accounts (way fewer students use Twitter than the mainstream media would have you believe). Lisa Lane also had a recent post about how to use Google Calendar to help students get text reminders of due dates but I'm not sure how many of my students use Google Calendar (and I think that method gets complicated if any of the due dates change). Bu...

A couple posts in Inside Higher Ed about Delicious.com got me thinking... I have a Delicious account but I almost never use it. I never really 'got' social bookmarking - it just has never seemed all that useful to me. From a personal standpoint, if there are websites that I use a lot, I bookmark them in Firefox so I can just go to the address bar and start typing what I remember of the page's title and it will show up in the pull-down menu (for example, when I need to access the SDSU homepage, I just go to the address box, start typing 'SDSU' and the homepage is the first thing in the suggested links box that pops up). If there are websites with information that I think I'll want later, I might save them to Delicious but even if I do, I have to go searching for them later and really, it often seems easier to simply Google whatever I'm looking for. I'm sure this is just a reflection of the way my memory works but if, for example, I come across a recipe...

I'm contemplating using Google Buzz as a way to broadcast announcements and stuff to my classes. At one point I was thinking about using Twitter for that but not very many students are actually on Twitter. I've also thought about setting up a Facebook page, at least for the 500-seater, but when I've surveyed students about that option, the response has been pretty lukewarm. I already tell students to use my gmail address (since my official school email account seems to get way too much spam), and I know that a lot of them have gmail accounts themselves. I use Facebook to connect with people I'm actually friends with, and Twitter for connecting with random bloggers and other online acquaintances (though I haven't been tweeting much lately at all), and I kind of like the idea of having a separate way to communicate with students. I just don't know if any of my students would actually want that. I guess I can give them the option and see how it works...

One problem I've always had with doing peer instruction using the CPS software from eInstruction is that you can either set it so that the answer distribution shows up immediately on the slide after the clicker question is closed, or not, and that applies for the entire session. There is no easy way for the instructor to see what the answer distribution is without also showing that distribution to the class. This means that if the answer distribution is mixed and I want to do peer instruction, students will also have seen the answer distribution and that can create issues with students assuming that whatever answer got the highest number of responses must be correct. At a recent workshop, I mentioned this issue and Mike Salemi suggested that I blank or freeze the projector before the answer distribution shows up; that way, I can see the distribution on the monitor at the podium but the students won't see it. I have no idea why that never occurred to me before but all I could...

I find myself working on several projects this summer that involve writing about my teaching approach in the 500-seat Micro Principles class and I thought that readers here might be interested as well. I previously posted about how I use clickers and podcasts . Most economics professors have, by now, heard of Aplia but for anyone who hasn't, it is a company founded by Paul Romer that basically provides online assignments. They work with several publishers and if you use a textbook they partner with, you can get problem sets customized to that text and an online version of the book. The first semester I used Aplia, I assigned several of the problem sets that corresponded to the Mankiw text I use. Students tended to hate them, I think largely because I did not edit the questions carefully enough, to make them match what I do in class and the questions I ask on exams (I don't use the publisher-provided test bank). In subsequent semesters, I have assigned fewer problem sets, and...