Using Current and Up-to-Date Examples as a Teaching Tool in Economics: A Description (2011)

INTRODUCTION There has been a multitude of new thinking and research about various teaching methods that can be used for economics courses, both for undergraduates and for graduate MBA courses (see Becker and Watts (2005) and Becker, Watts and Becker (2006)). The traditional and methods as a pedagogical tool in all subjects have become less and less popular as students become more and more demanding about teaching methods that are more in tune with the 21st century technological revolution. A traditional chalk and talk pedagogical style tends to make students less and less interested in the happenings of the classroom and more likely to let their minds wander away to other thoughts. With the advent of smartphones and the use of laptops in the classrooms, students have every opportunity to tune out their boring same old professor and hop onto the internet where they can easily peruse the happenings of the day, catch up with their friends on Facebook, Twitter and other social media or could carry on a text message conversation with their friends, some of whom might be sitting in the same classroom. In addition to this being a problem for all courses, economics courses have the rather unsavory reputation of being dry, boring, impossible to understand, too math and graph oriented, too abstract with little real life applications etc. The last comment is especially galling as the principle ideas of economics have everything to do with business, and it is really not too difficult to come up with hundreds of examples of applications of each economic concept. If you open the pages of any Business news website, or periodical you will find a lot of events happening right then that demonstrate some application of an economic concept. Mark Maier and Scott Simkins (2009) in a fundamental piece of pedagogical work called Just In Time Teaching (JITT) provide insights into the use of student assignments that students have to look at, grasp the concepts of the questions and finish in a few hours before class starts. Despite the obvious thoughts of slap dash work and corner cutting by students, the pedagogy actually helps students develop skills of introspection and persistence as well as innovation of thought. The idea behind this is really simple and practical: when students enter the real life and are employed, they will face innumerable in assignments. They will have to process the information and come up with strategies and solutions in a few hours. Students in a classroom realize this, and the excitement of having a project or homework that resembles a real life work assignment at least in terms of the available makes students more eager to engage in their coursework. Following the JITT innovation, in this paper we explain the process of using cases and examples that are currently taking place in the real world and relating them as applications of an economic concept that is being taught in class. Current text books in economics both at the undergraduate level and at the MBA level have increased the use of examples and cases to help students grasp an economic concept and to illustrate its use in the real world. A brief scan of the latest texts in both Principles of Economics and MBA Economics courses reveals the following examples and cases: LeBron James choosing not to attend college (opportunity cost), outsourcing to China (international trade), Pricing Tickets for Broadway shows (price discrimination), FCC Auctions (Economics of information and uncertainty) and the managerial perils of Asian chipmakers at the height of the tech boom (perfect competition). Unfortunately none of these examples can be called just in time i.e. the stories in them have all taken place quite a while back. Thus, students find it difficult to relate to the examples and cases because they are not current, and they have either forgotten about it or they have never heard of it. We can thus understand their complaint that economics concepts have few real life examples. …