Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

This is the second of a series of three guest posts from Mary McGlasson of Chandler-Gilbert Community College. Part I discussed her decision to create a set of videos for use with a hybrid principles course. PART II: How to keep the students accountable to watch (and process) the video content? In that last entry , I said, “I needed to be sure that my students worked through the content on their own, or the face-to-face portion would be a total loss.“ But I didn’t really mention how I keep them on task, did I? Students in my classes are kept accountable because they have to answer a set of practice questions on each of the videos they've been assigned for homework. They are assigned “Video Homework” each week, where they need to (1) watch each assigned video, and (2) complete an assigned set of questions about that video’s content by the assigned due date. These days, Learning Management Systems (Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Canvas, Moodle, etc.) make it easy for the instruct...

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...

This is a guest post from Liam Lenten from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.  Hello to all Economics for Teachers readers. I was at the Westerns last week, and came across Jennifer’s session on clicking technologies . She has been gracious in allowing me to provide a guest post, so here goes: As many of you are aware, much of (particularly) Microeconomics is about human decision-making. Since students make many decisions in their own daily lives, it should be easy to be taught effectively. The sports and cultural sectors have much (still untapped) potential to contribute to student understanding. By using interactive means such as YouTube and other internet resources, the classroom experience can be made more contemporary, relevant and interesting. I wanted to take this concept to its zenith – and as such, a year ago I wrote (and present in) a series of six short videos, called Some Sports Economics , with the aim of making a significant pedagogical contribution to te...

At the Westerns, I was part of a session on interactive teaching titled, “Flipping, Clicking and Other Contortions to Make Your Classes More Interactive”. Unfortunately, one of the participants, the one who was specifically going to talk about flipping his class, was struck with flight problems and couldn’t make it. However, he was kind enough to make a video of his presentation that we could show during the session. If anyone is interested, Steven also put the video (broken into two parts) onto YouTube, here and here . I also tried to record the other three presentations using Camtasia but there are problems with the sound (Steven’s video was actually running in the background and although the sound was muted at the time, Camtasia recorded Steven’s voice with the other presentations). So rather than posting the videos, here are (links to) the slides: Brandon Sheridan on Getting started with interactive teaching Mary Flannery on Interactive learning through current events (pdf of ...

I started this blog as a way to think through what I’m doing with my classes. At the time, I had no idea what would happen, if I’d stick with it, if anyone would read what I wrote. Although my writing ebbs and flows, I think blogging has been incredibly useful and has undoubtedly helped me improve as a teacher. I talked about some of those benefits in a session at the 2012 ASSA meetings, summarized in my post “ Why I blog about teaching (and you should too!) ”. If you’ve ever thought about getting into this blogging thing, Lee Skallerup Bessette, who blogs on InsideHigherEd , will be doing a free webinar , An Introduction to Academic Blogging, July 10, 2013 (starting at 10am, PST – the website doesn’t say how long it will last). And if you want to start with a few guest posts here, just let me know!

I’m about to get on a plane for Seattle where my session on Saturday, 4:30pm, looks to be one of only two sessions related to teaching. If anyone is attending, please come by! [101] Saturday, June 29, 4:30 – 6:15pm Flipping, Clicking and Other Contortions to Make Your Classes More Interactive (panel) Jennifer Imazeki, San Diego State University Mary Flannery, University of Notre Dame Brandon Sheridan, North Central College Steven Slezak, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo [169] Sunday, June 30, 4:30-6:15pm Teaching Economics Chair: Mark Holmgren, Eastern Washington University Papers: Mark Holmgren, Eastern Washington University, Do Giffen Goods Exist in Academic Learning? Susan Jacobson, Regis College, Beyond Content: What Should We Be Doing in Our Classrooms? Paul Johnson, University of Alaska, Anchorage, and Jonathan Alevy, University of Alaska, Anchorage, A Classroom Financial Market Experiment Mark Leonard, American University in Bulgaria, The Use ...

Some folks may have noticed that my posting is pretty sporadic. I was just looking at my stats and when I first started this blog (can’t believe it’s been five years!), I posted roughly every few days during the first year. Then it slowed down to about once a week. For the last several months, it’s been closer to once every few weeks, and some of those have been more public service announcements than me really writing about anything I’m personally doing with my teaching. This pattern is partly a reflection of what’s been happening with my classes – one reason I started this blog was as a place to ‘think aloud’ about what I was doing with some courses that were new to me and I was trying all kinds of random stuff, so it’s probably natural that over time, as I’ve honed what I’m doing, I haven’t felt the same need to write about them. It’s also a reflection of what’s been happening with me emotionally with regard to teaching – I’m definitely feeling burnt out. There is a reason that teac...