During Covid one thing led to another and I agreed to develop an online course for ECO 2620 Introduction to Environmental and Resource Economics. Here is how I describe what happened on the course webpage:
Some background: During the Covid-19 summer of 2020 the powers that be decided that this course would be a likely candidate for permanent (i.e., beyond Covid) of online delivery. I submitted a proposal to do so which was approved. I took a course in online teaching during Fall 2021 and began developing this course for online delivery. As a result, one section this course has transitioned from in-person instruction to fully online. During the Fall 2020 semester I taught the course using synchronomous Zoom with recorded lectures posted after the class meeting time. During the spring 2021 semester I revised the slides and recorded lectures which were then delivered asynchronously but “just in time”. The first time that the course was delivered asynchronously fully online was during summer 2021. I have also taught the course asynchronously and fully online during Fall 2021, Spring 2022 and Fall 2023. During the Fall 2023 semester, for the first time, there were two sections of ECO 2620 with about twice as many students in the asynchronous online section as in the in-person section. That enrollment pattern is the same this semester.
At the risk of public ridicule, here is the link to the YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvsPPwF_252LKEUfcCsvPwUMwd7_cU_md. There are some mistakes here and there, which I’ve been correcting with notes on the course webpage until they are so overwhelming that I “refresh” the course (i.e., record all of them again).
Comments and mild criticism welcome!
