Educational technology for teaching economics–Where to start and how to grow?

Abstract

New economics instructors face numerous challenges when selecting technology for their courses. Because economists teach at a variety of institutions with diverse student bodies and since technology continues to evolve, this article focuses on general principles that novice instructors should consider when selecting technology for their courses. One principle is that technology should support “deliberate practice,” which encompasses many types of active learning. Instructors should be aware of the various constraints they face, including the numerous cognitive challenges to effective teaching, limitations to their own “working memory,” and potentially limited resources of their students and institutions. The “Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition” (SAMR) framework is introduced to explain how technology might influence instruction. Finally, instructors should learn how to optimally use the technology they select.

Keywords:

• deliberate practice
• novice instructor
• technology

JEL codes:

• A2
• A22

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the symposium and the Journal editors for many helpful comments that greatly improved this article.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 The seminal paper is Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993). Deliberate practice has been the foundation of several important papers in physics education research, including Deslauriers, Schelew, and Wieman (2011), Jones, Madison, and Wieman (2015), and McCarty and Deslauriers (2020), while in economics there is Boyle and Goffe (2018).

2 Those wishing to improve their slides for maximum student understanding should follow Davis (2021).

3 Two descriptions of large language models are Newport (2023) and Wolfram (2023).