Microeconomics Online
As more universities venture into online distance education, instructors will
be faced with either developing a course from scratch or adopting a pre-packaged
course. Obviously, adopting software that has been designed, developed, and
distributed by a publisher or multimedia company can save the instructor a great
deal of start-up time. But d'es such a product limit the creativity a teacher
can bring to the course? At Dakota State University, one professor found that
using Archipelago's Micr'economics package offered him both time savings and
customizability.
Daniel Talley, assistant professor of economics at Dakota State University
in Madison, South Dakota, decided to try the Archipelago product as an experiment
in alternative content delivery. The product, published by Harcourt e-Learning,
combines CD-ROM courseware and Web-based lessons, replacing the printed textbook
he had been assigning in the course.
Talley used Archipelago Micr'economics for his summer course. Because it enrolls
only 30 students, Talley was able to devote extra time to helping them with
the technical aspects. Once they were up and running, students responded favorably.
"The graphics and visuals were terrific ways to explain economics concepts,
which are often best expressed graphically," Talley says, noting that the
abstract nature of economics lends itself to teaching with multimedia. And because
the Archipelago content encouraged students to experiment with data and test
variables, it better reflected the actual work of economists than most print
materials.
Surprisingly, many of Talley's students preferred listening to the text being
read to reading it themselves. "They thought it was easier to absorb the
meaning that way," he says. While some students commented that they missed
the portability of a paper textbook, at Dakota State, dorm rooms, classrooms,
library, labs, and even the cafeteria have computer terminals, so students could
access the course from almost anywhere.
The Archipelago product kit includes two CDs, one that installs the product
and one or more course content disks. Along with the software, the instructor
receives a manual, which is tied to course content, as well as a user guide,
which explains the ins and outs of the course Web site, creating multimedia
lessons, managing the course, and editing lessons. Talley reports that installing
the software is a bit tricky and requires very close attention to the instructions.
Archipelago is used on some campuses as a completely freestanding online course,
with no face-to-face meetings between students and instructor. Talley, however,
sees it as supporting material for his lectures, much as a textbook would be
used. Archipelago gave the students "two views of the same material—mine
and the author's," he says. Students could discern the meaning of concepts
better by drawing from both "voices." Says Talley, "The ability
to customize the content is definitely one of Archipelago's strengths."
For more information contact Daniel Talley at [email protected].
