Redesigning Course Overview

As I said in the first post, one of the main reasons for starting this blog is to record and share my thoughts as I change my economics course to reflect the way economics has changed since the beginning of the crisis in September 2008.

Before the crisis, I had been teaching economics for over ten years and my course had followed the standard micro/macro format. When the economic crisis hit, I found myself teaching a lot of material which I had previously only covered in passing or reordering how I presented material to answer student's questions about how the crisis was unfolding. The more I adapted my course, the more I became aware that it needed to be totally reformatted. A good example of this is the location of the concepts of market failure and public choice theory. I use to teach these as part of the microeconomics portion of my class. However, the concepts of moral hazard, asymmetric information and rent seeking behavior, have become common terms to explain the crisis and students need to know them to understand the current debates. So, I have changed my course to have a unit on these concepts right after the unit on markets. The logic of this is to have students understand why markets work and are beneficial, but that markets are not the solution to every problem - which is a mainstream economics idea, but one that is not grasped by most economics students (at least at the high school level).

However, while the economic crisis might have been the reason for reorganizing the course, the reorganization is not based around the crisis. Rather, as I reorganize the class, the guiding idea is to construct a class that will show students how different pieces of the economic puzzle fit together, become aware of how economist work to understand the the world (build models), and understand the key points of debate between the economists - chiefly this is the New Keynesian vs. Rational-Expectations debate that is at the core of macro-debate. Basically, I want my students to finish the course having a developed an economics thought process, and appreciation of how economists work and being able to follow the current debate over economics and economic policy.

I expect that the final result of this project will be a course that is more of a general (at an advanced level) introduction to economics than a macro/micro course.

I should note that I do not teach an AP Economics course. My course is an advanced class - it covers much of the AP material - but it is very different from an AP economics class. For example, I do a lot less work with problem solving through graphical analysis and more with math (including some basic calculus). There are other ways I differ from the AP program, but I will outline that in a later post. Not being tied to an AP program gives me the freedom to make these changes.