I thought the course was very different and interesting compared to many of the other economics courses taught here at U of I. While I am able to take away many things from this course, I believe the experience I really liked about the class was the interesting dialogue and freedom we were granted to talk about our personal experiences with the material taught in class. This was not only done through blogging, but also the discussions we had during class time. This made the material much easier and sometimes even challenging to understand, as we tried to really think about how the material affected our lives. The most interesting topic I thought in class was the model of how organizations deal with and detect shirking. It is something different from all other economics courses I have taken and I thought it was very interesting topic.
I also thought the excel homework's were not too difficult. I was very glad they offered background information of the topic before getting into them and really walked you through the homework so that you at least were able to understand the meaning of what you were calculating. However, I do believe while I understood what I was calculating, I sometimes had trouble assigning what the figure really meant on a larger scale. For instance, I had trouble with the insurance topic. I had trouble really understanding what the numbers meant in terms of understanding how to assign different types of insurance. But in all, the videos that accompanied the homework's and the explanations made the homework's easy to understand.
The only thing I did not like about the course was the tests. While I do believe they were fair, I felt that because some questions had multiple parts that often relied on previous answers to get the next parts, one mistake ended up costing big. Overall I thought the structure of the class was good and I really like the idea of having a group of people meeting outside of class to have a discussion. I believe that discussion is valuable and will help me think for myself and become a better, more well rounded individual.
Thanks for the comments. There is a basic pedagogic idea with using the examples from your own experience to learn the economics. You have a prior world view of how things work. Everyone does. Sometimes the economics supports that world view. Other times it contradicts it. The only way to really learn the economics is to compare your prior view with what the economics says and then test them for fitting the circumstance. With your own experience, you can perform that sort of test (not with statistical technique, put based on plausibility.)
ReplyDeleteYou are probably right about the exams being a bit all or nothing. It wouldn't be so bad if everyone got all. But it didn't work out that way. So I might have to modify for the reasons you mention.