3. Innovative Uses of Technology
This page contains examples of how I use technology to improve my pedagogy and make course content both accessible and interesting for students.
Course Websites and Online Teaching Materials
Below are dedicated course websites that I personally put together in the Fall 2019 semester to act as a platform for all course content (lecture slides, assignments, readings, tools and links, etc) in one accessible location for each of my courses. I intend to continue this into future semesters.
Before Fall 2019, I had hosted the majority of my course content (typically lecture slides, assignments, and links) on my personal website.
All materials are open source and are made available for anyone (students or general public) to use for their own benefit. Colleagues and faculty at other institutions (and strangers!) often email or tell me that they find these helpful, so I am happy to keep them open to the public.
| Website (Link) | Course and Semester |
|---|---|
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ECON 306 - Microeconomic Analysis (Fall 2019) |
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ECON 317 - Economics of Development (Fall 2019) |
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ECON 480 - Econometrics (Fall 2019) |
| Older Semesters | ECMG 212, ECON 205, ECON 304, ECON 316, ECON 324, ECON 326 |
Visualizations and Explanations
Below is a table of all the visualizations that I have made of key models and mathematical relationships in several of my economics courses. This allows students to more intuitively manipulate the models and see the key relationships and mechanisms by adjusting parameters and watching the model change in response. In the table, I link to the visualization and describe both how the visualization works and what concepts it demonstrates. All visualizations are coded by me in R and Shiny.
| Visualization | Course | Instructions/Moving Parts | Pedagogical Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visualizing Economic Tax Incidence | ECON 306 - Microeconomic Analysis | Set the demand and supply functions and tax rate to see how surplus changes. | Demonstrates the economic incidence of taxation and how it is strongly determined by price elasticity. |
| Visualizing Elasticity and Surpluses | ECON 306 - Microeconomic Analysis | Set the demand and supply functions to see how elasticity and surplus changes. | Demonstrates the relationship between price elasticity and economic surpluses in market equilibrium. |
| Visualizing Demand Shifters | ECON 306 - Microeconomic Analysis | Change the parameters to see how demand shifts | Demonstrates the relationship between underlying variables and how they shift demand curves with a simple example demand for beer. |
| Visualizing the Consumer’s Problem | ECON 306 - Microeconomic Analysis | Change the parameters to the utility function and budget constraint and see how the optimum moves (and is calculated) | Demonstrates the mathematics of constrainted optimization for consumer theory. |
| Visualizing Changes in the Consumer’s Problem | ECON 306 - Microeconomic Analysis | Change the parameters of budget constraint and see how the optimum moves (and is calculated) | Demonstrates how changes in budget constraint parameters cause a change in consumption behavor (the origin of demand functions). |
| Solow Model | ECON 317 - Economics of Development | Set the parameters for the production function and growth rates of economic variables to determine the steady state level of capital | Demonstrates the basic mechanics of the Solow (1957) model of economic growth. |
| Calculus of Consent Model | ECON 410 - Public Economics | Set the costs of making decisions, and some dynamics about the group to determine the optimal voting rule | Demonstrates the optimal decision rule using Buchanan and Tullock (1962) The Calculus of Consent |
| OLS Estimation by Min SSE | ECON 480 - Econometrics | Change the slope and intercept to try to minimize the sum of squared errors (SSE) of the line. | Demonstrates how ordinary least squares (OLS) methods choose the optimal $\hat{\beta_0}$ and $\hat{\beta_1}$ that minimizes SSE. |