Flipping the classroom with econlowdown.org

Abstract

In this article, the authors describe two independent efforts at “flipping” introductory economics courses employing econlowodown.org resources from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. From an instructor’s perspective, it is relatively simple to locate the high-quality free resources available online and assign them to students. Their alignment with national content standards in economics and prescribed State of Ohio learning outcomes are important adoption considerations under performance-based funding constraints. The authors document high rates of assignment completion, suggesting students found the resources easy to access and engaging. Overall, they found the online video podcasts and virtual lectures produced by the economic education specialists and instructional designers at the St. Louis Fed to be valuable instructional assets in different institutional settings and across disparate student populations.

Keywords:

• Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
• flipped pedagogy
• online

JEL CODES:

• A20
• A22

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Here, we loosely reference Bloom’s (1956) seminal work on classifying forms and levels of student learning.

2 The Starting Point: Teaching and Learning Economics portal defines just-in-time teaching as the instructional use of brief pre-class, Web-based, questions to identify student learning gaps. Then, in-class activities can be developed to address those particular learning gaps. See https://serc.carleton.edu/econ/justintime/index.html.

3 InQuizitive is an online, adaptive quizzing tool from W. W. Norton that combines interactive question types with game-like elements aimed at promoting student engagement. See https://wwnorton.com/inquizitive.