Survey about possible course re-org

The survey itself is here.  I ask that you take it seriously and give honest responses. We will discuss the results in class on Tuesday and make any decisions about how to address the issues that the survey results raise.

Here are the reasons for the survey:
1.  I am wearing out trying to keep track of the class, both because attendance has been spotty, and because some students have been erratic as to when they complete the work or if they complete the work at all.
     a.  While I've said attendance is not required, the issue is how students who miss class get caught up on what was said in class and indeed whether they are getting caught up or not.
2.   At the outset, I had expected that attendance would be better than it actually has been.  Had I more realistic expectations on that, I might have designed the class differently from the get go.
3.  The concept quizzes are new this year.  I've not done them before.  They seem to be successful in students accessing the PowerPoints.  However....
     a. The first real blog posts on student experience in organizations showed many students didn't understand the term transaction costs.  It pains me to see students post on something based on an erroneous assumption about the definition of a term.  Transactions costs are considered in some of those PowerPoints, including the one for today's class.
4.  On idealism caving into reality, if students are motivated in the course primarily based on the deliverables they are responsible for, the blog posts and the Excel homework being the main components of those deliverables, then they might prefer live class time to devoted to preparing them for that, rather than how we've been doing it now where the live class talks about the issues at a higher level or gives particular examples to illustrate the issues other than what the students will see in the homework.

I do believe student preference (suitably informed) should be an important factor in how a course is designed.  On the other hand, I think you have some bad habits based on how you've dealt with your other courses and I'd rather try to counter those than accommodate them.

In lieu of receipt function for form submission/Not commenting on Group 1 this week

I can give students View Access to the spreadsheet that collects the Excel Homework submissions.  The link here is to the homework on Efficiency.  I think this is consistent with FERPA and should satisfy those students who want to verify that their submission went through.

This week if a sufficient number of blog posts come in by Friday or early Saturday, so I'm kept busy with the commenting, I will not comment on the those of you in Group 1.  Your teammates should give you comments instead.   I do want to note that last week the flow of posts on Friday and early Saturday was so low I commented on the posts of students in Group 3, even though that was their week off.  I do urge you to get your posts in as early as you can.  Also, I want to note that if you are later that 3 PM on Sunday, you are at risk of not getting a comment from me and having your post marked as late, even if you are in the groups where I say I will comment on the posts.

Also note that if you get your posts in before the actual deadline, I will comment on them regardless of which group you are in.

Follow Up To Class Session Thursday September 19

Based on comments after submitting the Excel homework, some of you seemed to have difficulties with it because you didn't learn the lesson from the Tutorial, last week's homework, to use cell references.  Anyone can make a mistake, but not all mistakes are equally valid. In our class (and I assume in much else that you learn) the lessons are meant to be cumulative.  You really should try to use what you previously have been exposed to in the current situation. But doing that requires practice. 

Which leads me to the next point.  Given the little demo I did of how you would come up with the meaning of opportunism, in a operational way to use in framing your blog post this week, I wonder if you felt you could do that on your own or if instead you felt it was beyond your capabilities.  I will say, some things for me are quicker than they will be for you.  I have more experience and am closer to the expert end of the spectrum.  You are closer to the novice end of the spectrum.  But novices can still practice to teach themselves things and make operational meaning in a situation where they are initially unsure.

Before we did that example, we talked about giving employees autonomy as a way to provide them with motivation.  But a manager needs to have confidence in the employee for making good judgments before autonomy is granted.  So it seems to me that practicing this skill of making mean for yourself - without getting outside help - is necessary as a way for you to move up the ladder at your place of work, wherever that turns out to be - and to encourage your manager to give you more autonomy.   If you look at he post in the left sidebar by the former student, Susan Athey Econ 490 fall 2017, she says as much in her post, and that the habits practiced in college carry over to the workplace. 

Then I wondered if in last week's blog posts where some students reported not getting direction from their supervisor during their internship, whether instead of this entirely being neglect on the supervisor's part if some of it was delegation and the granting of autonomy to the intern.  How would you determine if it is one or the other as an outsider to the situation?  I'm not sure in any individual case, but with a large enough sample of interns if many floundered yet a few flourished that would be just the sort of evidence the company would want as to which interns to hire.

For Class Session on Thursday 9/19

The previous post on student responsibility

An explanation of some of the Excel homework

Q: Are the Concept Quizzes busy work only, or are they good prompts to become acquainted with the subject matter?

Q: Should we keep the in class mechanism as is?  Or should we move to online lectures and in class treat it as a TA session/office hours?

Snippets from the Course Syllabus - Lack of Professionalism by Some Students

The last week or two have both overwhelmed me and irritated me by students in various ways performing other than how the syllabus states.  I'm going to put some snips from the syllabus below to make sure we are all on the same page regarding your performance.

On Attendance:

In the last class session on Tuesday, at least 15 students and probably closer to 20 missed the class. None wrote me a note to explain why they had to miss.  More to the point, I don't know whether any of the students made arrangements with somebody who did attend to catch them up about what happened to in class. If that is not happening, there is disconnection with what is going on.  I really don't want to deliver the message I give in class a second time (done online) because students miss class when they very well could have come.

On the Blog Posts:

Many of the posts didn't make the word minimum requirement.  Even among those that did, however, many students didn't get the concept of transactions cost right. It is as if they read the prompt but ignored what else we had been doing (such as in the PowerPoint files on which the Concept Quizzes are based.)  The blog posts are meant for you to make connections among the ideas.  If you don't try to do that, you are defeating the purpose.

On Comments:

The vast majority of students hadn't written a comment in response to my comment before the class session on Tuesday.  I want to add here for those who missed the session on Tuesday that I mean the comments I give to be a kind of coaching and they should tie in with the discussion we have in class.  My mechanism is based on students seeing how this all flows together. 

---------

Tomorrow I expect to discuss this some, as well as the process students go through in doing the Concept Quizzes.  I sense a lot of surface learning here and if that is right then why bother?   Some students are struggling with math modeling now and I actually applaud their struggle (though I didn't mean this first real Excel homework to be difficult).  I'd like to see students struggle with the blog posts too.  What might encourage that?

Reminders

There is an Excel homework due this evening on Efficiency and Equity Concepts.  The link to the post on that, which has some questions in the comments area, is here.

There is a Concept Quiz on the PowerPoint for tomorrow.   This is about efficiency and more on transaction costs.

And there is a blog post due on Friday about Opportunism.

Please get your blog posts in soon!

I may have outfoxed myself by promoting the soft deadlines too much.  At this juncture roughly 2/3 of the class has yet to submit the blog post that was due yesterday.  If too many come in on Sunday afternoon, I will be jammed up and not have enough time to read and comment on them well.  If you have not done your post yet, please get it in at your earliest convenience.

A New Set of Grades Uploaded into Moodle

I just finished the grade processing/administrative/clerical work to get your grades into Moodle.  Here is a brief description of what was done.

First Blog Post on Your Alias Economist - If you made such a post, you should see an x in the feedback column for the item.  There are no points allocated for this now.  There will be points later, for the first half of all the blog posts.

Excel Tutorial - If you did it, you got 20 points.

Herbert Simon Concept Quiz - If you did it, you got 5 points plus the number of right answers.

Also for those who added the course late and/or were otherwise catching up, I updated the scores on the first two concept quizzes.

I was going to upload the scores on the next concept quiz, but it looked like many students had yet to do it.  On Tuesday, we should discuss in class whether the concept quizzes continue to make sense, now that there is both the Excel homework and the blogging.

Some linked content from today's class session.

A simple diagram of vertical integration that we will use repeatedly in the cclass.

If you are interested in learning more about the Economics of Education, here is the syllabus for a class in the College of Education on the subject.

Some Peter Drucker quotes about communication.

Administrative and Technology Stuff

Missing Class

Attendance is not required but I'd like you to come if you can.  Today, my eyeballing of the class is that we were at 50% or less.  It's pretty early in the semester for attendance to be that low.

If you want to remain a student in good standing but need to miss class, as it is says in the syllabus the professional thing to do is drop me a note ahead of time to let me know what's up.  If you are interviewing for a job, while that is not a university excused absence, I understand its a top concern for you.  I'm much more willing to help a struggling student who has alerted me ahead of time to being absent than I am to another student who seems to be blowing off the class.

If you have flu-like symptoms, I actually would prefer you not come in that case.  I think my own immune system is a little deficient these days and I don't want to get sick.  I know going to McKinley can be a drag but sometimes the medication really does help, so the visit is worth it.

Managing Class Size and Blogging

There are currently 38 students registered.  And at present we have 35 students blogs linked from the sidebar of the class Website in the box called Blogs of Current Students.  I am unsure of the status of the 3 students who have yet to send me the links to their blogs.  In what follows, I'm going to assume they all catch up and we are at 100% of the students with blogs linked from the class site.

There are too many students in the class for me to read and comment on each student's post every week.  So I developed a scheme to manage this in what I hope is a reasonable way.  First, if a post comes in before the actual deadline, noon on Friday, I will read and comment on it.  With the soft deadline approach we are taking in this class, I expect many posts to come in on Saturday and some on Sunday too.  I have divided the class into three Blogging Groups.  (See the tab at the top of the page to find out which group you are in.)  This week, I will read and comment on all blogs in groups 1 and 2.  Next week I, I will read and comment on all blogs in groups 2 and 3.  The week after that, I will read and comment on groups 1 and 3.  Then the cycle will start again.  This assumes there is no attrition in the course.  If the class shrinks because students drop out. We'll abandon this approach.

To make sure that the students who are getting comments from me nonetheless receive feedback, I've placed students in Blogging Teams.  Most of the teams have 3 students, 1 from each group.  This weeks the students in groups 1 and 2 on the team should write a comment about the post made by the students from group 3.  The comments should be a decent paragraph, at least, and should be aimed at encouraging the poster to think more about the issues in the post.  If by Sunday evening, there is still no post by the student from group 3, then the other team members are not off the hook.  They should make a comment on a group three student from some other team.

I want to note here that there is a benefit in reading the posts of other students.  It is a way to benchmark your own work.  For some of you, you'll take pride in what you've already produced.  For others it may be an indicator that you need to step it up in your blogging.    Please think of this in terms of the content in your post.  Especially if English is not your first language, don't worry about grammar and word usage. We understand that will come only slowly as you write more in English.

I also want to note that each student should respond to comments received with a comment of their own.  This response is a way to acknowledge those comments and to push the discussion further.

Excel Homework and the Pull Down Menu for Your Alias

As some students are struggling with the pull down menu, I gave a little demo in class about a work around.  At the bottom of the page, right click on the tab with the worksheet name.  There should be a closed lock icon on the tab to indicate the worksheet is password protected. The right clicking should bring up a menu.  Choose Unhide...   Select ID.   In column E of the ID worksheet, you should see all the aliases for the class.  They are listed alphabetically by the last name of the economist.  Find the row of your alias.  In cell S2, type that row number.  You should note that the pull down menu on the ID sheet now has your alias.  Then go back to the worksheet with your homework.  That pull down menu will also have your alias.

I also did a demo about hiding the Ribbon, to give more vertical space for you to work with, and by using the Split command under the Window so you can have a fixed upper pane a scroll in the lower pane or vice versa.  If you missed class today you might want to ask somebody who was there to help you out with this.

Excel Homework Due September 18 at 11 PM.

This is the homework on Efficiency Concepts and why the partial equilibrium concept and the general equilibrium concept don't line up exactly, as well as the special case where they do. It's important to have a firm footing here because economic efficiency is our starting point in looking at organizations the M&R way.  Then we can talk about various reasons for departures from efficiency.

If you have a question about this homework, please post it as a comment to this post.

Quotes and Links for Class Session on Tuesday Sept. 10

On the mismatch between instructor and student expectations:

Corollary to #4:  Every instructor assumes that you have nothing else to do except study for that instructor's course.
From Murphy's Laws on Applied Terror

Gertrude Stein quote on Genius:  It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
(Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso)

Question:  Are "good students" today over programmed?

On the ideal for undergraduate education at research universities:

Boyer Commission report (1998)
The report offered a blueprint on how to redesign undergraduate education to make the students insiders and appreciative of an inquiry approach to learning.

Students readiness for such a program is a big issue.  If students are not yet ready, then the first year of college must be devoted to getting students ready.  This will require intensive instruction that is likely quite expensive.  Historically, the first year is where most of the large lecture classes are taught.  The U of I had a Discovery Program (small seminar classes) for first year students, but the recession in the early 2000s and then the Great Recession about six years later severely cut into the Discovery Program.

On betraying the trust in higher education:

Disengagement compact

Underlying this is the notion that grades are verifiable (a third party can learn the information correctly) but human capital accumulation is not.  In the absence of a standardized exam in the subject, instructor performance can't be measured by how much students learned.  Research output, in contrast, can be measured.  So faculty rewards (salary increase and promotion) are typically based on that.  Likewise, if students learned a lot but received mediocre grades, they don't have a credible way to communicate to others about their learning.  The potential future employer only gets "to see" the human capital as it is deployed doing work for the company.

Declining By Degrees

Documentary and Book  In addition to the disengagement compact, universities compete for students in a way that raises the cost of education (think of expensive athletic facilities) and this type of non-price competition may be socially destructive.

Academically Adrift

The book argues that many college students experience very little value added to their thinking by attending college.

Excellent Sheep

The book was based on the author's experience at Yale, where he then was an assistant professor of English.  The students were quite competent at jumping through hoops set by the instructor, but they were also very unhappy and didn't know how to go about pleasing themselves.

What Straight-A Students Get Wrong
A NY Times Op-Ed by Professor Adam Grant of Wharton.  It argues that these students are putting way too much effort into something that isn't all that productive and they should redirect their energies to other things that are.

Concluding question:

For there to be be improvement made, a SWOT analysis needs to be done on both the U of I and higher education as a whole and that must be done by insiders at the university, who then make their findings public.  While it is easy enough to discuss strengths and opportunities, can we have an open conversation about weaknesses and threats?

First Grades Uploaded/Please Get Other Work Done

Just to see whether I can do this, I uploaded grades to Moodle.  There were three bits of data that I uploaded.  (1) Your alias economist.  You should see that in the feedback area for the item.  (2) Your score on the concept quiz for the first class session.  Everyone currently registered did that concept quiz.  (3) Your score on the next concept quiz.  Most students have done that now.  If you haven't gotten it done yet, but can get it done by the end of the weekend, you'll still get credit. 

A couple of people made a second submission of the concept quiz.  That's not how it works.  You only get one try.  My record keeping is much easier that way, and I did show you how to cheat on it in PowerPoint so you should not need a second try.  Also, please use the alias you were assigned.  It becomes harder for me to identify you when you use the wrong alias.

Some students have sent me the links to their blogs and have written their first blog post on their alias economist.  I have put brief comments on those.  If you are in this category and you've checked Moodle, could you let me know that you can see your grades by writing a comment to that effect on this post?  (Only the first student who has done so needs to write the comment.  If it works for one student it should work for everyone else.)

For students who have yet to send me the links to your blogs or who have yet to make that post about your alias economist, please get that done as soon as you can.

Follow up to the session today on the University as an Organization

I wonder how the videos worked for you today.  Truthfully, for explicating data, they are probably as good as a live presentation where I would otherwise have to futz with the computer screen in class.  It did work from my end.  My throat was in much better shape today after class than on Tuesday.   I do hope they have a microphone for me soon, but now at least there is plan B in case not.

Here are some subject matter ideas on the various videos and related issues.

About tuition - We didn't mention college specific surcharges.   While they didn't exist at all when I started back in 1980, they are now important.  The one for College of Business started during the time I was an Associate Dean there (2006 - 2010).  I know the surcharge for the College of Engineering was already in place by then, but I don't know when that started.  Something to understand about these surcharges - the bulk of the money flows back to the specific college.  In contrast, for the base tuition, much of that goes to campus administration.  This is an example of transfer pricing, which we'll be talking about in a few weeks.

The other very important issue with tuition is that the table I showed might be referred to as "list prices."  If a student gets a full or partial scholarship, then the "transaction prices" will be lower than the list prices.  It would be great to get data on the transaction prices - what fraction of the students are paying the full list price and what sorts of discounts are the other students getting?  I believe such information is harder to come by, though I'm not really sure why other than for this reason.  If student A pays full tuition and student B gets a discount, is part of what A pays used to cover that discount for B?  Were it framed that way, A might be miffed.  On the flip side of this, I think the campus needs to be open about how such discounts are allocated.  And if we looked at income distribution of the families who have students attending the U of I, I would guess that the upper middle class and well to do families are over represented.  (Right now I'm saying that without the data to back me up, but I don't think it is a fabrication.)   To attract more students from working class families, those tuition discounts will be needed.

Another variable to consider that we didn't discuss is class (or section) size.  I showed that IUs have risen about 10%.  We didn't present any information on the growth of instructional staff.  If they have grown, but by less than 10%, then class size must be going up, on average.  There is also a composition effect to consider.  Fewer students are majoring in the humanities now.  Humanities course are frequently taught in smaller sections.  If those students who used to major in the humanities are now majoring in other disciplines,  economics for example, and econ classes are larger on average than classes in English or comparative literature,  this shift in what students major in will also cause an increase in average class size.

Marketing of the U of I - What message is getting out?  From when I started in 1980 to the mid 2000s, I was a pretty serious fan of U of I men's basketball.  I would go to home games and watch the away games on TV.  Of interest here are the commercials that aired during halftime that promoted the university.  (I'm guessing that the same commercials would also air at halftime of football games.) My recollection, imperfect as it may be, is that many of these commercials featured a dedicated researcher who somehow brought undergraduates into the research, either within a class setting, or as part of the research team in the researcher's lab.  The message being sent was that research and undergraduate education are strong complements and that undergraduate students get involved in research when at the U of I.  I don't doubt the sincerity of the faculty member depicted in the commercial, but I always question how representative those commercials were of the overall situation on campus. I haven't seen such commercials recently.  (I stopped watching basketball here a while ago.)  Has the marketing changed in accord with some of the data we looked at in class today?  Or is it still pretty much the same as it was?  It may be the normal expectation is for a large organization to somewhat hype its product, whatever the organization and whatever the setting.  But too much hype starts to be a violation of trust and thus tarnishes the brand of the organization.  We should discuss this a bit more on Tuesday.   We should also discuss how much the marketing matters for forming an impression of the university.

Teaching a course as if the subject is a settled matter versus taking an inquiry approach -  Intermediate microeconomics, as a methodology, is pretty much a settled matter.  Applications of intermediate micro, in upper level courses such as ours, the topics are far less settled and interesting questions keep popping up that deserve to be addressed.   Are researchers more likely to embrace an inquiry approach than teaching faculty?  I don't know the answer to this question.  For those of you who have already taken other 400 level courses in economics, it would be good to learn how those courses were taught, as settled or as inquiry.  And for those of you who have another major in math or science, it would be good to know if the answer is different there.

Videos for Class Session on Thursday Sept 5

Course Ethos

Scheduling

Enrollments

Instructor Pay

Tuition

An Alternative Way To Schedule Classes

A university in Australia is embracing Block Teaching.  In the U.S., I believe Colorado College does this, but it is not widespread.  We will consider the pros and cons.

Australia Embraces Block Teaching Across The University 

Reminder - Blog Post Due This Friday at Noon

This is the blog post about the economist who forms your alias.  The deadline here is even softer than usual.  Getting it done sometime over the weekend is fine.  I'l write a short response to your post, but nothing too grand, so I don't need as much lead time to do that.

Also, if you get a smaller photo of your alias economist, you can put that photo in your profile.  It will then appear along with your alias every time you make a comment.  It's a cute touch!

Reminder - Excel Homework Due Sept 11 at 11 PM

You can get the homework here.  The file must be downloaded.  The is is the first homework - a tutorial for doing the other homework. 

One student who has done it already reported difficulty with the pulldown menu for choosing your alias.  The student didn't say but I'm guessing the student was on a Mac.  (My sense of things is that having Office function well is a big reason to have a PC, so I believe Microsoft deliberately makes Excel clunky for the Mac.)  Nevertheless, I just tried it and it worked okay.

You do need a current version of Excel.  You can get the entire Office suite here at no cost to you.  Alternatively, there is a computer lab in the basement of Wohlers.  You can do the homework there, though I have no idea how busy the lab is.

If you have questions about the homework please post them as a comment on this post.

Some follow up items to class today

First, the responses to the survey about which class produced the most learning for you coupled with your answers can be found here. The identifying information is removed, so if you want to share with others you are free to do so.  I thought the variety in responses was itself interesting.  You have different criteria by which to evaluate when a learning situation is good for you.

Second, some students had trouble setting up their blogs because they were somehow still into their campus accounts.  Overhearing them, they tried it with an anonymous Web page.  I'm not sure what the means.  If they want to elaborate on this they can do so as a comment to this post.

Third, I found myself shouting so that you could hear me in class, but at the end of the session my throat was hurting.  As I had pneumonia in the spring, I'm not wanting a repeat of that.  I have requested from the AV people to see if they have a microphone I can use that would amplify my voice through the room sound system.  That is plan A.  Plan B is that I might record chunks of presentation to play so I can take a break from shouting and you hear the recording for a few minutes, then we resume.  Plan C might be one of you, or a group of you, running the session instead of me.  Are there any volunteers for that? 

Fourth, I seem to always forget to do something I had prepared for in advance.  Have any of you seen the movie The Paper Chase, which came out in the early 1970s?  (There was a subsequent TV show based on the movie.)  Indirectly that movie had an impact on how I conduct class.  For now, let me ask this question.  Which is better for learning, a formal approach where I call you Miss or Mr. along with your last name, or an informal approach where I call you by your first name?   Can you justify your answer based on issues we've already talked about in class?  Let's start with this one on Thursday.

Fifth, on my trying to match names with faces, today I had more success with the women than with the men.  While I applaud the guys growing beards, I've had mine for quite a while now, it makes you harder to distinguish from one another.  I'll eventually get this, but it might take a bit longer than I expected.

By the Numbers

If we had the data readily available, we would look at a variety of quantitative information about an organization to help us understand what the organization actually does, how the organization allocates its resources, and what performance indicators the organization uses to measure how it is doing. Further, if we have historical data of this sort we can then look at how the variables have changed over time and use that to investigate changes in organization behavior.

Alas for private corporations, much of their information is tightly held and we won't be able to look at it.  But for the U of I, there is much institutional data that is released publicly, and it behooves us to take a look to see what we can garner from it.  And the Daily Illini maintains a faculty and staff salary database that can be useful for this purpose. Further, 23 years ago I was able to get some institutional data that is not generally released, because I was doing a study under a grant from the Sloan Foundation, and the university wanted to encourage Sloan (perhaps with a renewal grant) so they supported that work.  We'll take a look at a bit of both.

The first Excel Workbook gives some of the publicly available data.  There are three spreadsheets, each with different sorts of information.  The first is about students in class, which the university measures in instructional units (IUs).  An IU is a credit hour.  So our course, being 3 credit hours, means each of you enrolled in the course generates 3 IUs and then the total number of IUs for the course are the number of students enrolled times 3.  Instructors are divided into three categories - Tenure Track (and Visitors), Grad Assistants (TAs), and Specialized Faculty (these are instructors not on the tenure track whose full-time job is teaching).

In the ideal we'd have some additional data, that we don't have here.  The first is dollars spent per IU.  In our class, this is pretty simply to calculate, since I'm paid just to teach the class.  If we had 50 students, which makes 150 IUs, and if I were paid $15,000 to teach the class, which I'm not but I'm using the figure to make the calculation easier, then the expenditure on instruction per IU would be $100.   When I was a full time faculty member, it was pretty standard to allocate faculty time as 40% teaching, 50% research, and 10% service.  Plus, at that time there was a 4-course teaching load.  Thus you could allocate 10% of my salary then to teaching the class and compute expenditure on instruction per IU that way.  As you can see, those numbers would depend on faculty salary, teaching load, and fraction of overall obligation that is teaching.   It would be good to know how expenditure on instruction per IU varies with - 100-level courses, 200-level courses, etc., how it varies with the department that offers the instruction, and how it varies from courses that satisfy general education requirements to those that are for the major.  I can provide some anecdotal information on this, but it would be good to see the numbers.  I've never seen such information presented.

It would also be good to have some metric of quality of output, but that is much harder.  Does it matter for students learning who does the teaching?  We'll discuss this some in class.  But not with any hard data.

The second spreadsheet is on Economics faculty salaries - only Assistant Professors and Specialized Faculty.  The salary numbers coupled with the teaching loads of Assistant Professors, which I will provide in class, offer up an explanation for why there are Specialized Faculty now (there weren't when I started by in 1980).  I've also included my salary from when I started as a benchmark to see what's been going on since then.

The third spreadsheet gives a historical look at Tuition and Fees plus other expenses.  I will ask students in the class, focusing on those from Illinois, what their next best alternative was if they didn't attend the U of I.  While this wouldn't be a perfect answer for that, it would be good to see Northwestern tuition and fees and Illinois State tuition and fees over the same time interval.  That would help in understanding what happened historically.  Do note that tuition at the U of I is a political animal, set by the Board of Trustees with advice from the University President. 

The next workbook is old data from spring 1996.  You can't find this information publicly available, but it is interest.  Take a look at Table 2, which shows the size distribution of undergraduate classes by enrollments.  (Credit hours may not be uniform across these courses.  If credit hours were uniform, then enrollments and IUs would be isomorphic.) . The distribution is highly skewed, half the enrollments in classes with at least 160 students, and a quarter of the students in classes with at least 500 students, while there are many much smaller classes. Further, the large classes tend to be introductory courses, while the smaller classes then to be advanced courses.

In class we will discuss some of the implications of this and how the situation has changed over time.  We will also contrast this with some other information.

Geographic Distribution of U.S. Students in Econ 490 fall 2017

Data about family income at the U of I (from the NY Times)

An Interesting Piece on How Paying for College Creates Stress on Middle Class Life

If you do read this piece I'd be curious to know whether your family is in this situation and/or whether you know others at the U of I who are in this situation.

How Paying for College Is Changing Middle-Class Life

Where we are

This morning we had 39 students registered and that still is the number as I write this post.  Maybe the adds and drops have settled down.  I hope so.

Of the 39, 28 have completed the first concept quiz.  I would like every students who is registered to complete that.  There is also another concept quiz due next Tuesday on the next PowerPoint presentation.

We are roughly a half lecture behind from what I had scheduled for the first week, meaning I had jammed in too much stuff to cover.  I'm guessing that by the end of next Tuesday we will be a full lecture behind and then we'll push things back a day.  I said in the first class session that the pace will be determined by us.  We are under no obligation to cover topics in a specific time frame.

For those of you who started in Engineering and then transferred to Economics, I encourage you to read the blog post by my former student who is writing under the alias Susan Athey Econ 490 fall 2017.  She wrote quite a poignant piece that might speak to you. 

More generally, we might talk some about depression and school and about depression and work. It's not the most pleasant topic, but it is a reality that you should be aware of.  We all will hit a wall sometime in our careers.  We should consider what might be learned from the experience, how you likely can bounce back, and some ways to keep it from repeating over and over again.

So I'd like to discuss that at some depth.  I am expecting us to get to the University as an organization,  on Tuesday, but how far we go on that we'll have to play by ear.

Gift Exchange and Collegiality as the Basis for a High Productivity Work Environment

There is a rather large literature on "efficiency wages," where workers earn job rents (they are paid more than their opportunity cost) and this is done for productivity reasons.  There are a variety of explanations for this.   The gift exchange story gives one of those and is attractive, in part, because it is more sociology than economics.  (We clearly care about the welfare of others, but that conern is usually absent in the economics approach.)    The efficiency wage approach, in turn, followed a similar approach called "implicit contracts" where, in effect,  the employer and the workers have a mutual agreement of the sort, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine.  When it's time for your own back to scratched, you earn a (quasi) rent.  The hero of the implicit contracts story is Arthur Okun.  He referred to the back scratching arrangement as "the invisible handshake."  Incidentally, implicit contracts can exist elsewhere than the labor market.  For example, a shop owner might very well have an implicit contract with her loyal customers.

The gift exchange model is the brainchild of  George Akerlof.  Given that Janet Yellen was the Chair of the Federal Reserve, Akerlof may have come to be widely known as her significant other.  But he is a first-rate economist in his own right.  Indeed, he is a Nobel Prize winner.

JSTOR: The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Nov., 1982), pp. 543-569

Akerlof's theory is rather simple to articulate, as is the debate over the right way to provide incentives in the workplace.  The quintessential issue is whether pay should be performance based and hence vary from individual to individual who hold the same job or if instead pay should be position based and not feature such idiosyncratic variation, except perhaps on a seniority basis    Of course, even with fixed pay per job, performance matters.  But it is rewarded differently than when there is pay for performance.  The argument is that promotion should be the primary reward for exceptional performance.  Within a job classification, the workers need to be managed fairly, which provides the basis for equal treatment.  Fairness is more of a sociology concept than an economics one.  

The vision for why gift exchange produces superior performance was supplied by Dumas père in The Three Musketeers.  It is embedded in the relationship between Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (the workers doing the same job) and D'Artagnan (their manager) and is captured in the phrase, "All for one and one for all."  Akerlof crafts that vision and related ideas from sociology to make an economic model of it.  For the non-economist, it might be framed as collegiality-driven productivity.  Here are the model's basic elements.

There is a minimal performance standard below which the employee will get fired.  There is a performance norm, substantially above the minimal standard, that typifies what workers produce.  The difference between the minimal standard and the higher norm constitutes a gift that workers give to the firm.  Likewise, there is a minimal wage below which workers would quit and find work elsewhere and there is an actual wage above that minimum that the firm pays to workers.  The difference is a gift that the firm gives to its employees.  Gift giving demands reciprocation for it to be sustained.  When that happens all involved feel good about the place of work and productivity is high as a consequence.

There is one more piece to the puzzle.  This regards how productivity is observed and what explains variation in productivity from one worker to the next and for one worker over time.  From the worker's own perspective, this is mainly due to random factors - circumstances beyond the employee's control.  Or, in the case where there is clearly a drop off in a particular employee's performance, it can be attributed to outside of work stresses (e.g., a sick child at home) that are apt to be temporary in nature.  The correct response in this case is not to punish the employee but rather for co-workers to chip in and pick up the slack.  Sometime in the future, the employee who received such help will lend a hand when another co-worker has a similar problem.

Someone who favors pay for performance but comes to the issue of appropriate compensation with an open mind might grant that collegiality-driven productivity can be a good thing, as long as the fire burns within all the workers, but will argue that eventually a worker burns out and turns into dead wood.  That is not temporary.  It is a permanent change.  Then he will argue that the gift exchange approach sustains the dead wood, who act as a drag on the entire system.  One needs, instead, a time-consistent way to purge the system of the dead wood.  Performance based pay does that.  (This issue has been discussed quite a bit with regard to teacher pay and teacher tenure.)

Akerlof's model does not address that critique.  Before I provide my own answer, let me take a slight detour.  The Akerlof gift exchange model is essentially social in nature.  There is a different reason to depart from performance based pay that is intellectual in nature and is particular to knowledge work.  This other view is articulated by Daniel Pink in this RSA Animiate video and focuses on psychological explanations for productivity.  There can be performance anxiety or, if you prefer, writer's block. High performance is achieved when intrinsic motivation is strong and the individual becomes so involved in the work as to entirely lose a sense of self.  Making extrinsic rewards overt moves the individual's focus away from the intrinsic motivation and thereby lessons productivity.  Better to have the economic rewards provided up front so that one can put them out of mind when the real work commences.  While I have critiqued this video on how it represents the economics, I concur with its representation of the importance of intrinsic motivation.

Burnout then can be thought of as the disappearance of intrinsic motivation.  The response to the critique is to look at the causes for why intrinsic motivation should disappear.  One possible cause is a sense of plateauing in the work.  There is little left to learn, no inherently new challenges.  For the most part it is a rehash of what's come before - been there, done that.  When it happens, it would seem to make sense that the worker should move onto a new challenge; do something else.  There is, however, a different cause that is also possible.  It is that the individual confronts organizational barriers that seem arbitrary and anti-productive and those barriers repeatedly thwart the individual's creative efforts.  Eventually, the individual wears down from not seeming able to accomplish sensible change.  Gallows humor becomes part of the routine as the individual loses the desire to fight the system.  This second cause might reasonably dictate that more fundamental organizational change is necessary.  The burden shouldn't be placed on the individual to accommodate organizational inertia.

It is this second cause that forms the basis of the response to the critique.  The Akerlof gift exchange approach must happen within a dynamic organization that makes organizational learning paramount.  (See Senge's The Fifth Discipline.)  Employee burnout might still happen in such organizations, but it would be far rarer.  When it does happen the appropriate organizational response should be job reassignment rather than immediate severance, this in accord with the gift exchange view.  Collegiality, in tone and actual practice, then characterizes good jobs and is at the heart of how the organization remains productive.

In my years working in learning technology, everyone I've encountered knows this implicitly, though I expect that the vast majority of them were not acquainted with Akerlof's gift exchange model.   I wonder if people reading this post with a prior disposition toward pay for performance might consider collegiality based alternatives instead. 

Observations from the Class Session Today

Several things threw me off my game a bit, one I hadn't anticipated, another I had but didn't make a suitable accommodation.  Then a couple were just that I expected one thing and something else happened.

Students to my right sat closer to the front of the room than students to my left.   On the left the first two rows of seats were empty and there were students in the last row.  On my right I believe each row had some students. The effect was to create a stagger in the seating from right to left.  Coupling that with some difficulty hearing people in the back and we will make some adjustments on Thursday in the seating so this is less of an issue moving forward.

I am very nearsighted and on my home computer the computer resolution is set low so text looks large.  The computer resolution on the classroom computer was much higher and I was put off by that some.  I think I had too many windows open for navigation purposes. I either need to figure this out or bring in my own laptop. We'll see.

I was so concerned with keeping the audio down when playing the PowerPoint before the class session started, because I didn't want to disturb other classes, that I think it didn't catch your attention as it otherwise might.  We might spend a few minutes next week on what an effective presentation does and how one makes one.

Checking the concept quiz results, it appears that quite a few students did the concept quiz during our class.  If anyone did it but wasn't present in the classroom, that is a definite no-no. Even for those who were present, it's bad form to multiprocess in this way.  It is an indicator that you aren't paying full attention in class.  This is one reason I will ask you put to away electronic devices after the first few minutes in class from here on out.

I have a photo roster of the class.  I believe the photos are from your I-Card, though I'm not 100% sure of that.  I certainly didn't memorize that roster, but I thought I'd recognize more students than I did.  I wonder if you feel you now look like your I-Card photo.  Either this Thursday or next Tuesday, I will take attendance, not to track whether you are there but so I can learn who you are and match names with faces.

Getting Deeper Into Some Items From the First Class Session

Is School Work or Play?

You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
Warren Beatty

Silliness and Learning - Can They Happen Simultaneously?

What do cows in Greece say?

A view of school as work.  (I believe this is the prevalent view, even today.)  The Little Rascals were on TV when I as a kid.

In spite of the prevalent view, might school actually be play some of the time?

The Fun Theory - How hard would it be to design school in this mode?

Your professor when he was in high school, a true math nerd.  Play and work were jumbled together.

Down and to the right, the coach of the Math Team and my favorite teacher, Mr. Conrad.  With bright kids, really good teachers make the learning a kind of play. 

Good Technique for Learning - Mindfulness

There was a slide about optimal technique for learning.  Here I want to drop the jargon word - optimal - and simply contrast good technique, which we will call taking a mindful approach, from poor technique, which we we will call taking a mindless approach.  A mindful approach does help to build human capital.  A mindless approach skims the surface of the subject matter only and produces little real learning.  

Ellen Langer's book - The Power of Mindful Learning

If it is your habit to be reading regularly non-course books during the semester, I encourage you to make this book one of your choices to read.  If not that, consider reading it over the winter break.  It's a fairly quick read and will help you reflect about your own approach to learning and what you might do to make your own learning more mindful.   In the meantime, you can read this short essay now.  It too is by Ellen Langer and gives the highlights of points made in more depth in the book. 

Examples:

I teach without lecture notes.  I've done that for most of my career.  When I did use notes I found I had my head in the paper I was holding so I didn't spend enough time looking at students.  It turns out that the the faces of students are pretty revealing about how engaged they are with the discussion and whether they are getting it or not.  I also would go way too quickly with the content.  To a large extent, students should set the pace of the discussion, and do so with their questions or comments.  This is especially true if the subject matter is difficult.  But what's difficult for the student might not be difficult for the professor.  So more often than most instructors would care to admit, the student gets left in the dust as the professor pushes onward - to no real benefit for anyone.  Without the notes I have to reproduce in my head the topic for that class session and there is an element of improvisation in doing so, even when I have a pretty good idea of what we'll be discussing.  The improvisation is being mindful, as it is like thinking through the matter anew.

As I've gotten older, I do occasionally forget things and will have a senior moment, now and then.  One reason for having the Tag on the class site, Extending the class session online, is to cover things I had forgotten to mention in class.  And if it does look like I'm having a senior moment, please be kind.  That can be disconcerting and the consequences can linger as a result, even after the senior moment has passed. 

Here's a different example, one that students who took an earlier offering of this course told me about, perhaps 7 or 8 years ago.  They reported that in many of their classes they didn't need to attend, if they could get the lecture notes from a friend.  (So, if I understand this correctly, the friends could divide up who would attend and then share the lecture notes after that.) They said their job was to memorize those notes and then at the exam spit back what was in the notes to answer the questions.  The way they described the practice it sounded pretty mindless.  Is it something common in courses now?

Is Creativity The Same As Mindful Learning?

Here is Maslow on The Creative Attitude.  (You have to be on the campus network for the link to work.) You should be aware that Lincoln, one of our examples in the first class session, was considered a consummate self-actualizer by Maslow.  As Maslow argues that self-actualization and creativity are pretty much the same thing, this is an indirect argument that how Lincoln taught himself, reading by the light of the fire, was both a path to self-actualization and to creativity.

And here is a more recent piece by Csikszentmihalyi on The Creative Personality.  You might read this to see if it fits you in some respects.  Also, you might ask whether you find these descriptions attractive or unattractive.  Many of them express the dualism of yin and yang.

We should also reckon with the question of whether creativity is about the process of doing things or if it is about product.  Some people are reluctant to consider themselves creative because on the product front they've yet to produce things that others would find creative.  There are some quotes from Thomas Edison that are helpful here:

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.  

I have not failed.  I've just found 10,000 ways that will not work. 

If we think of creativity as the initial spark, typically there must be a lot of follow through to get to an interesting product.  The self-actualizer is one who maintains concentration through the entire process.  If you can generate the spark, but you have trouble on the persistence that's needed afterwards, note that there is now much discussion of Grit and that it is something that can be acquired, though doing so itself is effortful. 

Puzzles for the Economics of Organizations 

Your textbook, when we get to it, will articulate something called The Efficiency Principle.  Organizations tend to produce the efficient outcome and that is indeed part of their purpose.  When we see what evidently looks inefficient, we should wonder whether there is an economics explanation for the inefficiency.  In particular, if a big part of the University's job is to encourage deep learning in its students, then how can the practice described above with the lecture notes persist?  That is evidently a puzzle.  

It turns out that economists have a range of possible explanations for inefficiency.  Some we'll cover later in the course.  Here I will mention a particular explanation that relies on a notion called "lock-in."  The best known paper that discusses the phenomenon is by the Economic Historian Paul David.  It is called Clio and the Economics of QWERTY.   Although this paper was written for professional economists, it is readable by the lay person and it's actually quite fascinating, in its analysis and in its conclusion.  QWERTY was originally efficient.  It was designed to slow typists down so the keys wouldn't jam so often.  As long as we had manual typewriters, QWERTY probably remained efficient, even with improvements in the mechanisms.  Electric typewriters got introduced in the mid to late 1960s.  Word processors and personal computers came 10 to 15 years later.  There was then no reason to slow down typists.  Yet QWERTY persists to this day.  Here's a little bit to explain why that is.

People learned touch typing, a skill needed so they could look at their document while they typed, rather than look at the keyboard.  The ability to touch type is a kind of specific human capital.  It has value in the keyboard layout it was learned and no value whatsoever with a different keyboard layout.  So those already knowledgeable about QWERTY wanted their PCs to use it.  Likewise, the schools that taught touch typing wanted QWERTY to persist as their training approach was built around the assumption that QWERTY would be the keyboard design. 

In other words, lock-in is about interdependencies that end up supporting the status quo, whether it remains efficient or not.  The status quo was not always that and when it was new it was designed to solve a then current issue.  So it was efficient at gestation and in the aftermath.  But if it is persists for a while, because of lock-in, it likely will no longer be efficient.  Yet what is better can't be implemented because the lock-in prevents that from happening.

Note that lock-in is quite important in current information technology and all the big IT companies, Facebook and Google are two notable examples, have as their goal to lock users into their online environments.  Also note that this is tied to the revenue models that these companies use.  Consider two alternatives - (1) users get access to content via subscription to the service or (2) users get access to the content which is ad supported.  Alas, the subscription model lost in this competition.  The ad-supported model won, giving the providers incentive to cull personal use information, so the ads could be customized.  This has led to all sorts of abuse of the information.  I'm sure you know of many such examples of this that I won't get into here.  The point is that even with all of the bad practices, where the users personal information is at risk, use persists, because the users are locked in.

We might next consider the lecture itself is illustrating a kind of lock-in.  Lecture emerged as an adjunct of Gutenberg's printing press (which meant that books need not be hand written).  Books, however, were still scarce.  So the lecture arose as a way to disseminate information that was in a book to those who didn't have the book.  Then those who were taught by lecture and who themselves became teachers would also lecture, because that's the approach they knew.  This persists to this day, even though now information is clearly abundant.  Indeed, everyone is on information overload.  Yet in many disciplines, lecture is the main form of instruction.  I do want to note that a lecture format can seem quite similar to a seminar format, if Q&A is allowed throughout and the audience aggressively asks questions.  That's the way it is when the audience is itself full of professors and the person presenting is giving a talk on current research.  With undergraduates in the audience in a course setting, however, the audience tends to be more passive unless the instructor actively does things to get the students to talk up.

Getting back to our example about the lecture notes as the be all and end all in some courses, others have written about the lock-in in ways that make it seem like a pervasive phenomenon.  The paragraphs below are from a paper called What We're Learning About Student Engagement From NSSE: Benchmarks for Effective Educational Practices by George Kuh. (You can access this paper if you are on the campus network.)

The more pages students write, the more pages faculty members have to read and give feedback about. And the more of that we do, the more likely it is that students will make appointments during office hours to talk with us about that feedback. In terms of student engagement, all this is generally positive. But it becomes problematic in terms of allocating time across multiple faculty priorities.

And this brings us to the unseemly bargain, what I call the “disengagement compact”: “I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone.” That is, I won’t make you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won’t have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well. The existence of this bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many students get decent grades-B’s and sometimes better. There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learning-on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximal effort, and on the part of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions provide.

To this, I'd add two additional effects that support the lock-in.  In the early 2000s, when you were very young, the then President George W. Bush pushed through No Child Left Behind, and "the accountability movement" had its moment in the sun.  Standardized testing took on greater importance, as a way to measure whether improvement in the schools was happening, the intended consequence, and students became far more grade conscious as a result, the unintended consequence.  The other effect, on the instructor side, is that more and more undergraduate education has the teaching done by non-tenure-track faculty.  (We'll talk about why this is in the next class session.) These faculty don't have the job security that those with tenure have and they need the students they teach to give them decent teaching evaluations, so they can keep their jobs. Each of these factors reinforces the disengagement compact.

Before getting to the next item, here are a couple of other ways that lock-in manifests at the university.  The first is with regard to the academic calendar.  Summer is treated differently than fall or spring.  This is because 100+ years ago, when the economy as a whole was largely agrarian, students had to go home to help their families with the planting and with the harvest.  Very few, if any, students do that today.  Yet we treat the summer session differently and practices have grown around it, such as the internship during the summer, that keeps the summer session as it is, even though it would be more efficient to have three equal terms a year - fall, winter, and summer, and to get students to graduate earlier as a result.    The other example is given by a rhyme I wrote some years ago called, The first ten days blues.  It's about the add-drop period at the start of the semester, which made sense when we did registration on paper, but doesn't make sense anymore with registration online, yet it persists.  I'm also including it to show your professor is a bit over the deep end, but does have a sense of humor.  So if you find this one is silly but liked it anyway, then I've hit my mark.


Signaling and GPA

Old TV commercial about Abe Lincoln needing a college degree to get a job.

Michael Spence's article called Job Market Signaling, August 1973, which was a foundational piece in the then new information economics. Spence eventually became a Nobel Prize winner.  This paper is one reason why.  My guess is that the model itself is too difficult for most students in the class, but reading the introduction of the paper is probably do-able and you might find it interesting.

I will describe the model briefly, but before doing that, what is signaling about?  It is helpful to begin with a notion of private information.  In a transaction between a buyer and a seller, the seller might have information that that the buyer cares about regarding the quality of what is being sold.  If higher quality fetches a higher price, then the seller has incentive to represent the quality as high, regardless of the true quality. But talk is cheap and both the buyer and seller should understand that.  So such representations should rightfully be ignored, as with them it is impossible to separate the chaff from the wheat.

Signaling is about taking a costly action that is meant to communicate the private information.   The uninformed party (in this case the buyer) makes an inference about the quality based on observing the signal.  This works when high quality sellers are willing to incur the cost of the signal, but low quality sellers are not.  The signal then serves to separate the types and enable the buyer's inference.

In Spence's model, the students ability is the private information and the signal is getting a college degree (not the GPA, just the degree).   At the time the paper was written, the big cost in attending college was the opportunity cost of time for students, who might otherwise work.  Nowadays, tuition is probably larger than that opportunity cost, but tuition doesn't differentiate between high ability and low ability students.  Getting back to Spence, in his model the high ability students were willing to accept the cost of college if employers would then infer they were high ability, so hire them at a good wage.  The low ability students would not.  So the college degree worked as a credible way to communicate about the student's ability.

For us, we need to come up with some interpretation of what ability means in this context.  And we need to ask whether high ability in school translates to high performance on the job.  Ability can mean either something truly innate, for example, some people can separate their middle and fourth fingers in the Vulcan salute (from Star Trek) while others cannot (I'm one of those), and if there are such innate attributes that matter for productivity those are candidates.  But ability here could also mean human capital that is acquired prior to attending college.  As I write this I'm trying to resist using the word intelligence, though it might be the first thing that pops into your mind reading this.  Most measures of intelligence confound innate ability with previously acquired human capital.  There is also a school of thought, see Mindset by Carol Dweck, that intelligence can grow as long as the person pursues their own learning to foster such growth. What I want to avoid is any discussion of eugenics, which is out of bounds for our class.  Sometimes the mere mention of the word intelligence will do that. So I'm trying to exercise caution here.

Let's turn to the issue of whether high ability in school translates to high ability on the job.  If the job is being a professor, then the answer is yes and ditto for being a research scientist at a major corporation.  What about other jobs, does the translation work then?  The answer is less so, if at all.  Here's only one dimension of this to consider.  People who are introverts may thrive in a school setting but then not fare well at all in a work setting and vice versa for people who are extroverts.  Note that being an introvert and being shy are not the same things, but there is a positive correlation between the two.  If oral communication skills are important in the workplace, then shy people will perform less well in that context, at least until they overcome their shyness.  Depending on one's major, oral communication skills may not matter much in school.

Now we want to go from the college degree as a signal, meaning the signal is binary, yes or no, to a continuous variable as signal, GPA.  Waving our hands, we might now imagine the ability parameter in Spence is continuous, so a higher GPA means high ability.  Does that make sense?  Let me give a few different examples where it does not.  One is the idea of a late bloomer.  For a while the student's performance is mediocre.  Then the students experiences some life changing event and thereafter performs at a very high level.  The GPA, however, reflects an average of both.  The flip of this can also happen.  A student can have a very high GPA but be going through burnout, at or around the time of graduation.  The burnout may be important for how the student will do in the workplace, but it is not captured well in the GPA.  Then there is the issue of students experimenting with subjects they have not been exposed to earlier.  Curiosity should be rewarded, in general, but taking a course outside of one's field, and lacking the background that others who take the course already have, the grades are apt to be poor in this setting.  So high GPA students tend not to experiment in this way.  Is that caution something that should be valued in the workplace?

Given these caveats, what is it that GPA signals and why is it that students these days care about it so much?  Members of the class might be interested in this Website published by journalism students at the UofI Education On The Line.  Because I haven't seen the data they've amassed and am not quite sure of the methodology they've employed in analyzing the data, I don't want to totally embrace their results.  Yet what they argue is plausible to me.  Grade inflation, measured by the fraction of A grades awarded has been rising and the GPA has become less important for getting a job, though it remains a factor.

When I was a freshman at MIT back in 1972, they had pass-fail grading only, no letter grades for the first year.  In one class I took, I had earned enough points that they told me not to take the final.  How many of you would prefer that sort of system?   MIT went to pass-fail grading for first-year students, I believe, to take some of the stress off.  Depression at MIT at that time was a serious issue.  They had a high suicide rate.  I mention this alternative so you have something else to consider.  A quite current piece argues that sort of system will actually encourage more learning. 


Wrap Up

Here I want to ask whether the lock-in to a memorizing the lecture notes approach and the GPA as a signal on the job market are two different things or essentially one and the same.  Let's pose this question by considering the student's time allocation problem.  If time were spent in mindful learning for a class, would that help with getting a good grade in the class or not?  Does it matter how much time is put into the mindful learning activity?   Might it be that the lock-in is a consequence of students over programming themselves, so in addition to their courses they have a part-time job and xyz extracurricular activities?  And, if so, is this itself a consequence of students wanting to pad their resumes?  (The economics jargon for this is tyranny of the extensive margin over the intensive margin.  If quality of the experience is harder for an outsiders to measure, then make the list of experiences longer, because that can be measured.)

My intent in posing these questions is raise the awareness about the issues with students in the class.  Ultimately, students should be in control of their own learning - whether in their courses or in other activities.  How does one exercise such control?  Trying to answer that question is worth the inquiry. 

Please Complete the Start of the Semester Survey

It's quite brief and should be easy for you to do.  You can find it here.

Are Economists Good For The Economy?

This piece says they aren't.  I want to note that not all economists should be included here.  But the majority of the profession should be.

Blame Economists for the Mess We're In

A Necessary Part of Every Econ Student's Education

Found here

A Little Nostalgia About Me

This post might be most interesting for what's in the sidebar on the lower right, which gives how I described myself to people who came to my blog back then (August 2006).  At the time the blog was hosted on a campus site, a server meant for other functions.  I had to move the blog when that server shut down.

Skinning a cat (found at the Wayback Machine)

Some Blogging Factoids

Photo of your alias

If you find a photo image of the economist who gives the first part of your alias, you can download that and then re-upload it to your Blogger profile.  There is a section for profile image.  If you include that image, then all your most current post listed on the class site will have a thumbnail of the image, as will any comments you make.

This is not necessary, but it is a nice touch that will personalize our site more.


Hyperlinks in posts

Unlike what you may be used to in other online environments, if you simply paste a link into your blog editor it will publish the text of the link, but the link itself will not be live.  To make a live link, you need to select the link tool from the toolbar.  Also, the custom is to highlight some text and link that rather than to insert the url into your text.


Hyperlinks in comments

There is no toolbar for making comments.  Comments do accept basic html commands.  So if you are comfortable with that you can use those commands to put in a link or to format your text.  If you are not comfortable with that, ignore this.  It is not necessary.  I really don't know if it is a skill that people need to have after they graduate.  Ten years ago I would have said it was.  Now, I'm not sure.

Setting Up A Blog For Class - Part 2

This is the rest of the tutorial.   Once you've made a test post, please email me the link to it.  I will then subscribe to your blog and list it on the class site.  Having subscribed to it, I will automatically see updates to your blog.

Setting Up A Blog For Class - Part 1

The instructions below are based on the assumption that you will use Blogger to set up your blog.  To do that you can't use your university email as a login and indeed you must be sure to have logged out of your university email to proceed (or use a different browser than you use normally).

As an alternative to the instructions below, you can use the campus blogging service (based on WordPress) at publish@illinois.  Then you log in with your NetID and password.  You can adjust your screen name to your alias, to protect your privacy.  But I don't know whether you can access the site after you graduate.   Further, it seems that blogs at publish@illinois require a U of I login to make a comment.  That reduces the attractiveness of this alternative.  Also, for commenting on the class site you will either do that anonymously or use your real name.  If you use Blogger and make your alias your screen name, then your comments to posts will also be given by your screen name.  (That assumes you are logged into your blog.)  This is a big plus.

As still one other alternative, you can have a blog in Moodle, which is then not publicly available.  Truthfully, this is much less convenient than the other alternatives.  But it protects your privacy the most because the the rest of the world doesn't have access to the Moodle class site.  If you want to pursue this alternative you must contact me about it.  I have to set it up for you.  Truthfully, I've found that students blogging under an alias is sufficient to protect their privacy that this added step is not necessary.

- - - - -

The instructions below and in the next post are aimed at setting up your blog so that you post under your alias - nobody outside the class will know who you are - and make sure that everybody understands this is a blog of a student, not of the person from whom the alias was constructed.

The video below was made for the class from a few years ago.  It is applicable still, though Blogger has changed a bit since.  In particular, there is no longer Google Plus, so you don't have to worry about that alternative any longer. Also note, that it assumes you are making a new Gmail account just for this use.  As an alternative, you can use your non-university Gmail account equally well, if you are not already using Blogger with it.  Do not use your campus email.  That will not work.

Note that in the video where it says My Econ 490 Alias, your alias is of the form Famous Economist Econ 490 fall 2019.  Also that that for the url of the blog, you should take the spaces out, but for the name of the blog and your screen name, you should leave the spaces in.  (And for the screen name, the name of the famous economist suffices.  The rest is redundant.)

The main thing is to use the Blogger Profile, not the Google Plus profile.  The Blogger Profile is what allows you to post under an alias.  See the image below.  You can find this on your blog dashboard under Settings, then User Settings.

Sarcasm and Humor in a Bundle

Important stuff they won't teach you in Business School.

Murphy's Laws of Middle Management

Students - put away laptops, phones, and tablets

 “They still feel like [technology] is still necessary when the classes are not engaging enough. Like, for example, being in a large lecture hall or when the professor is what they call ‘boring.’”

The quote is from a piece in Inside Higher Ed about a survey of students attitudes of technology in the classroom.

Especially early in the semester, at the start of class there may be a technology demo at which time it is okay to  have your electronic device out.  After that I will ask that you put them away.  We will try for mainly class discussion, not lecture, which I hope engages you enough that boredom is not the issue.

Our Class Is Now Open For Registration

It is listed in the Course Explorer, Section I3 (or I4) of Econ 490.

Innovation in Undergraduate Education

This is an interesting read because it is an indictment against what regular higher education seems to have become.  All the alternatives seem, in some sense, to want to go back to an earlier time.  I wonder if students in our class feel this same need even as the pursue the Economics major at the U of I.  (Note that I don't have a Tag called Education in the News, so I used the closest one to that.)

The Anti-College Is on the Rise