by Doug Mills, CITES EdTech Consultant

Economics Professor Hadi Esfahani works hard at helping the first semester freshmen enrolled in his ECON 103 course succeed in the transition from high school to university. ECON 103, Macroeconomics, is a required course for all econ majors but meets a general education requirement as well, so there are students from all across campus and from many different backgrounds. Professor Esfahani's section is specifically for first semester freshmen. He observes that they often struggle with the increased workload of university-level courses, discovering they are no longer in the top fifteen percent of the class with minimal effort, and the adjustment to large lecture classes such as his, with an enrollment of up to 250 students. His response to these challenges is to engage the students as much as possible, both inside and outside of class.

A primary means Professor Esfahani uses to engage his students in class is what he calls "quick quizzes." As he prepares each lecture he looks for problems he believes the students should be able to work out on their own with some carefully constructed guidance. This content becomes the basis for the quick quiz of the day. As he delivers his lecture in class, there inevitably comes a PowerPoint slide with the quick quiz theme music. Students know this is the signal to pull out a blank sheet of paper and prepare to scramble for answers. Progressively revealed on that slide will be a brief description of a current situation with questions about the relevant economic implications of that situation. Past examples have ranged from the inflationary impact of government decisions in response to turmoil in Venezuela to the opportunity cost of Kobe Bryant's decision to skip college and go straight to playing pro basketball. Quizzes are open book and open discussion, but students are required to write their own individual answers. The normally orderly lecture hall explodes in a flurry of activity as students check their notes and consult with classmates in lively discussions on the topic and then record their answers which are collected and graded by the hard-working TAs. The lecture proceeds then with answers to the questions fully explained to the re-energized and engaged students. In addition to engaging the students, Professor Esfahani credits "quick quizzes" with helping to level the playing field among students of diverse backgrounds. By allowing student interaction and discussion on the topic during the heart of the lecture, he observes that the insights and understanding of those who had "gotten it" are disseminated to students who may have been still struggling with the concepts covered.

In addition to the highly successful quick quizzes, Professor Esfahani uses another technique used by many lecturers, but takes it to a whole new level. Professor Esfahani enjoys incorporating relevant economics cartoons into his PowerPoint slides to liven up the content and drive home the point. However, he is not satisfied with just the static display of the cartoon. As part of his lecture preparation, he actually breaks the cartoon into its separate frames and separates the speech bubbles or other elements of the cartoon to provide an engaging animated presentation. He believes this holds student attention and drives home the point of the cartoon more effectively. Using this same technique of animating and progressively revealing an otherwise static display of information, Professor Esfahani enlivens his use of graphs and their role in economic analysis, especially when elements of the graphs shift due to parameter changes. Not only does this technique help to engage students, but it also helps focus their attention on the salient points of the graphs.

Econ 103 Compass Homepage

Outside of the lecture, Professor Esfahani engages his students through his Illinois Compass site and an off-campus economics resource site called aplia.com. Professor Esfahani was one of the "pioneer" users of Illinois Compass when it first came to campus in Spring 2004, and his use has been exemplary from the start. One look at his Compass home page with the colorful custom icons he created says, "Here is an instructor who invests time and creative thought into making the optimum use of the online component of his course!" That first impression is accurate. Professor Esfahani makes extensive and thoughtful use of Illinois Compass communication components including announcements, email, discussion boards and the ability to post his lecture slides and solution sets. He also makes frequent use of the Tracking information available in Compass in corresponding with students to further understand their online involvement in the course.

He is use of the announcement tool is fairly typical-reminding students of assignment availability in the aplia.com website and other course housekeeping issues via pop-up announcements when students log into his Compass course site. Similarly, the sharing of course content such as lecture notes and solution sets via his Compass site is a fairly standard practice as well. One thing that stands out about Professor Esfahani's sharing is that he makes all lecture PowerPoint slides available from the beginning of the semester. If I want to look ahead to lecture twenty in order to preview the three theories attempting to explain the upward slope of short-run aggregate supply-that PowerPoint is available to me now. While these advance postings of the PowerPoints do not include quick quizzes or cartoons, solutions to the quick quizzes are posted online after the lectures.

Professor Esfahani is unique in his avid use of the Illinois Compass email tool. Most instructors on campus (and I have to confess most of the Compass consulting staff in EdTech as well) are turned off by the fact that the Compass email system is internal to Illinois Compass such that it requires logging into Compass rather than it being integrated into one's normal email account (though it is possible to have copies of messages from the Compass system forwarded to an external system, but messages still have to be answered from within Compass). Professor Esfahani sees a number of advantages to this arrangement and enthusiastically shares them. He points out that the Compass-internal email system is spam-free. Because it does not accept email from outside of Compass, it is not susceptible to spam attacks. More importantly, he likes keeping all the emails related to his course separate from correspondence about administrative duties, research, etc. He requires his students who want to email him to use the Compass-internal email system, and makes a point of checking his Compass email before checking his normal email so students who comply with course policies get faster responses than those who fail to use Compass email.

His Compass course site typically includes three discussion boards: Question and Answers about Assignments, General, and Feedback. The first of these, not surprisingly, tends to be the busiest by far as students seek clarification of assignment requirements and the logistics of connecting to the aplia.com website. The General discussion board highlights current issues in macroeconomics as well as upcoming relevant events on campus. The amount of traffic on this discussion board depends a lot, Professor Esfahani says, on the composition of the class each semester. Professor Esfahani posts frequent references to online journal and news articles, some of which elicit online discussion from students. Students also sometimes post links to articles they've discovered as well. The Feedback discussion board is for comments about the course itself. Professor Esfahani does not use the option allowing anonymous posts for this discussion board, preferring instead that students remain accountable for their remarks in the public venue. He encourages students to pass comments they prefer to be anonymous to him via other means including notes left at his office.

Complementing his use of Illinois Compass for communication with his students, Professor Esfahani uses aplia.com, a commercial site which provides online access to the text for the course as well as problem sets and other supporting interactive content. Rather than buying the text, students pay a fee to aplia.com to register with their site, which covers access to the electronic text and the interactive problems sets required for the course.

While it's true, of course, that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink, Professor Esfahani's approach to teaching Econ 103 goes a long way both in the classroom and online toward engaging students beyond a level that might be expected in a large lecture class.