Overview

Teaching was always central to my understanding as a University lecturer. I have a deep interest in understanding how students learn and therefore how we, as teaching staff, can support such learning.

Below you will find some of my thoughts on a range of issues.

Doing Economics

Together with Eileen Tipoe I have authored the Doing Economics online book, which is part of the coreecon portfolio of online resources. My main contribution here (together with my late friend and colleague James Lincoln) is the writing of the R versions of projects.

Interactive Textbooks

In my large year one Advanced Mathematics and Advanced Staitstics units I (2020/21 to 2021/22 for Maths and since 2022/23 in Stats) relied on delivering material largely via an interactive textbook style resource. This resource combines text delivery with online clips. This is in principle just like any website could do. But the unique feature of this resource is that it

  • Ties in with the virtual learning environment (in my case Blackboard), i.e. data are exchanged about student activity
  • It allows the inclusion of questions to give students practice and feedback opportunities right at the place where new material is delivered
  • The type of questions which can be tied-in is very varied (multiple-choice, fill the gaps, calculation and algebraic questions). These questions can be randomised such that students can obtain multiple fresh practice opportunities.

Here is a short write-up of my experiences including student feedback.

This video clip provides a brief walk-through:

In summary I conclude that, certainly in the context of this course unit, but perhaps also more generally, there can be significant benefits to keep the content delivery online for students to peruse asynchronously such that live meetings can become a more meaningful part of students’ learning experience.

Presentation Slides

Here are a few examples of such lesson from the Advanced Statistics unit. They are set as pdf files, but you will see from these files how the questions and videos are tied in with the content delivery.

Some of the work leading to this has been supported by the Royal Economic Society, COVID support funds. Some of these sections received substantial editorial and editing support from Yichen Zhu, University of Manchester.

Automated Assessment for Mathematics and Statistics

As I have been teaching Mathematics and Statistics for large Year 1 University cohorts I have been attempting to develop assessments that can be efficiently administered (in other words, being largely automatically graded) and yet allow the testing of a variety of skills. At the same time, the online nature of these assessments make it imperative, assessments are delivered in a way that make unwanted collaboration (where assessing individuals summatively) very difficult.

The method used in my big Year 1 Advanced Mathematics and Advanced Statistics units rely on the Mobius platform by DigitalEd (similar assessments can, to the best of my knowledge, be designed using the Stack platform).

This video, 22min describes the user interface and some of the useful assessment features that can be built into automated assessments. Some of these are

  • Randomisation of question information
  • Creation of multi-part questions
  • Algebraic answers (using EXCEL style syntax)

A somewhat longer workshop recording (60 min) is also available. This recording also discusses how you can build questions that are (fairly) robust to being solved by A.I.

Flipped Classrooms

I have been applying principles of flipped classroom pedagogy for many years. My general ideas on this topic are best summarised in this shourt introduction (with Alvin Birdi) to a special issue of the International Review of Economics Education (2018, Vol 29) Flipping the Classroom: Old Ideas, New Technologies (2018) (with Alvin Birdi), International Review of Economics Education, 29, p 1-5.

In short I believe that the most important contribution of flipped classroom pedagogy is that it allows lecturers to concentrate, in live meetings with students, on providing students with deeper discussion of the content’s real-life context, question and revision opportunities, in short with opportunities to better motivate students to engage with the material.

Thoughts on how to use the flipped classroom methodology in a small-group teaching context are available from this article (with my colleague Steven Proud) Flipping Quantitative Tutorials. (2018), International Review of Economics, 29, p 59-73.

Discussion Boards

Discussion boards have become an important part in my teaching delivery, especially in large units. Some of my experiences are summarised in this blog post. I created a number of other resources to support lecturers:

Much of this work was supported by the University of Manchester’s Institute of Teaching and Learning for which I held a one year fellowship (in 2020/21).

Teaching Econometrics

I have been teaching econometrics units since I completed my PhD as a Time-Series econometrician. In my teaching I have been using elements of classroom flipping such that I can spend more time in the classroom on motivating students by focusing on intuition and applications. This is facilitated by providing substantial elements of content through video clips. Many of these are collected on my YouTube Channel.

I am enthusiastic about helping students to develop practical coding skills (currently mainly in R). To support this me and colleagues are collating some resources which guide students throuh the learning process in R on the Econometric Computing Learning Resource - ECLR webpage.