Since I started to teach this class, the blogging has been a feature that students mainly like while students are more divided on the Excel homework. I want to draw some meta lessons from that (as if we're looking down on the class from on high).
I've only taught one non-economics course at Illinois, which was a CHP class back in 2009. (I have been involved in some adult education short courses, but not through the university.) The title of the class was Designing for Effective Change. It was the first time I taught with blogging and I published an article about it in Inside Higher Ed. I learned several things from that experience. The two I'll mention here are (1) the need to have aliases (though I'm guessing that potential future employers wouldn't be able to find your blog even if you used your real name) to help get students comfortable with blogging out in the open and (2) the benefit of reacting to what students say without trying to steer the students to some correct answer. Had I taught an Econ class as the first experience with blogging, I don't think I would have come up with that. So it was a happy accident. Sometimes we benefit from serendipity. And we definitely benefit from learning by doing.
I was trained in graduate school on how to do math models for economics and I lectured on them for many years. At the graduate students level, it went pretty well. At the undergraduate level, the results have always been far more mixed. Except for some spot lectures to clear up student confusion, what I've found is that a significant fraction of the students either can't penetrate the lecture or show no inclination to try, so within 5 minutes they have a glazed look on their faces. The video lectures are a partial solution to that. Experience suggests that iff students can complete the Excel homework without watching the video all the way through, most of them will do that. But if students are bored with the face to face lecture and won't watch the video all the way through, what's a better alternative?
Now I'm going to put this a different way. The class is heterogeneous regarding comfort with the type of math we used in this class. The math types or those who are considering going to graduate school in economics, are quite comfortable with the modeling. Other students are not. Can the others still benefit from the Excel homework? I don't have a good answer to that question. But I do want to note that in class yesterday I suggested trying the Excel homework again, with a different alias, and see the second time through if you're comfortable with the material or if it is a struggle. Practicing on the homework this way should make you more familiar with the model and improve your confidence for the final Moodle Quiz.
I want to note the following, which is not about our course per se but about having facility with models. When I was a campus administrator, I would make simple models of the situation on the fly. It helped to discuss the situation with colleagues. I don't know that other administrators did that, so I'm pretty sure it was my economics training that made me feel the need for doing it. This is different than applying pre-existing models that you've been taught, though the supply and demand paradigm is quite useful in this way; sometimes a pre-existing model can help. But mainly it was doing something from scratch, keeping it pretty simple, and then knowing how to get some implications from that. If you can develop that skill, it might help you when you reach the managerial rank. It probably won't help at all, in your initial position, though you might get a better sense of what your company is doing by trying to have a model fit the situation.
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