FDTL 5 Project: Embedding Computer-Based Learning

Beyond dissemination strategies: Embedding computer-based learning & effective uses of WinEcon & VLEs

Why is it that an internationally acclaimed, multi-award winning C&IT resource, developed with significant sums of public money, which addresses a wide range of identified subject and generic priorities, is largely neglected by the Economics profession? This project aims to address this problem, and, amongst others, pay particular attention to difficulties associated with the time cost of setting up and getting to know the resource, and secondly our desire as academics to customise material for our own teaching.

This project, which emerged from a user consortium, aims to train a peripatetic team which will work with lecturers in their institutions to enable them to customise WinEcon to their particular modules and institutional VLE. By exploiting the power of VLEs and the new Web facility within WinEcon, we hope to enable lecturers to customise the resource to fit their modules (rather than the other way around) at a fraction of the time cost it would normally take unfamiliar lecturers. We thus aim to train a small expert team who will visit HEFCE institutions, and work directly with module leaders in the summer of 2005 and 2006, in order to embed WinEcon in their teaching. We expect that the project will prove particularly useful in supporting students entering programmes with diverse backgrounds in Economics and second level education more generally.

Institution: Birmingham University
Project Leader: Cillian Ryan