Www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk Continued Engagement (Beyond the Life of the Project) Cillian Ryan and Rebecca Taylor.

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Continued Engagement (Beyond the Life of the Project)

Cillian Ryan and Rebecca Taylor

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What we learnt from WinEcon Dissemination project

• Aim was to facilitate dissemination of existing prize-winning software by creating team of implementers.

• Implicit test of hypothesis of main barrier to dissemination.

• Evidence mixed.

• Tried to carry over lessons to other Economics projects

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What we learnt from WinEcon Dissemination project

PROS:

• Student focussed

• Bite sized, reusable objects

• Core material

• Mostly time-invariant

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What we learnt from WinEcon Dissemination project

CONS:

• Based around ‘toolkit’

• Not Microsoft compatible

• Originally web links version dependent

• Originally largely ‘mainframe’ dependent

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What we learnt from WinEcon Dissemination project

• Questionnaires and use evidence indicates that students more likely to use if product is web-linked

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What we learnt from WinEcon Dissemination project

• Implementation needed to be durable.

– Links Not version dependent

• Easy access essential (easily downloadable by students).

• Microsoft compatibility desirable

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What we learnt from WinEcon Dissemination project

• ‘Product’ needed to be portable between successor lecturers

• Where ‘will’ existed use of implementation team was a success

• Presence of technical barriers often meant that work of implementation team was wasted

• No substitute for ‘desire’

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FAME (FDTL5 Economics)

• METAL - Mathematics for Economics: enhancing Teaching and Learning

• FEELE - Finance and Economics Experimental Laboratory at Exeter

• Applying WinEcon

• ETC - Embedding Threshold Concepts

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METAL

• Improve student engagement with Mathematics for Economics

• An interactive set of online resources

• Online question bank

• Over 50 video clips

• 10 lecturer-focused teaching and learning guides

• Real world Economics case studies

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METAL

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FEELE

• Encourage use of economic experiments

• Increase motivation and retention of students

• Each student participates in 25 - 30 experiments during the Exeter Economics programme

• Developed new classroom experiments for undergraduate modules

• Available via Wikiversity

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Embedding Threshold Concepts/

• Key ideas

• Give an insight into how economists think

• Microeconomics – opportunity cost

• Macroeconomics – the multiplier

• Deepen first year undergraduates’ acquisition of threshold concepts.

• Materials can be used in small and large group teaching sessions

• All materials are available via the ETC website

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Continued Engagement

• Dissemination strategy

• Encourage ownership

• Student engagement

• Subject Centres

• External links

• Future projects