Class Review

Other than what I would call common sense knowledge regarding organizations, I really had never learned or knew anything about different economic theories regarding the inner workings of an organization, or how people’s behavior can be viewed through the economic lens.  Now, having saved all of the excel homework for future reference, I have a nice stockpile of information that I can no doubt use sometime in the future, especially as I take on management roles. 

The structure of the class was not exactly ideal for me.  I typically prefer to listen and take notes while your class emphasized participation.  However, I realize that this was designed to get us to communicate so I would not go as far as to say you should change the format. The blogging, which I will talk about further on in this post, was a surprise to me because of how much I progressed throughout the semester.

Before this course, I really had no idea what to expect in terms of the difficulty.  I knew it was going to be economics related, and quite frankly this scared me because math is not my forte and economics can get quite complicated.    I really appreciated the approach you took in order to make sure we wouldn’t get caught up in trying to understand formulas and instead helped us to see the underlying economic issue at a conceptual level. 

I felt that the excel homework was a valuable and excellent way to introduce the complex mathematical theory that much of this class is based on.  It made it much easier to a, take things one step at a time and not get overwhelmed by the complexity, and b, it allowed us to see things visually which is a great learning tool for myself personally.  I am fairly sure others would say the same. 

As I have mentioned before, blogging is really not my cup of tea.  At the start of this semester, it was definitely somewhat of a struggle to sit down and crank out the required word length.  However, as the semester progressed and I got more comfortable with the process, I found that I could sit down, put my ideas on paper, step away for a bit, and then come back and put those ideas into a structured piece.  I also found that the more I did this, the more I enjoyed the writing and was not really focused on a word requirement.  Rather, the words came easier and usually by the time I had fully expressed myself and responded to every part of the prompt, I was well over the word requirement.

Changes I would make to the course would first and foremost make the class partially online.  Given that most of your students are seniors, the motivation to attend class is not always there.  Having part of the class online is, in my opinion, a way to ensure the material is still communicated with literally no excuse for students not to know it since it is online and always available to look at.  I have a different course where part of the class is online and not only is attendance at the live session great, but discussion is better because students have questions about the material they were presented with in the online session. There are obviously pros and cons of each, however, I feel that online classes will only become more and more common with the advancement in technology, and it would make your class more appealing to students in the future. Other changes would be a possible video associated with the excel homework like you did in some of them which explain the harder formulas and how to work them.  I say this because I struggled at times to figure out how to manipulate them and get the correct answer.

Overall, I enjoyed the course and would recommend it in the future.