As a follow-up to Part 2 in this series, here are specific examples of how culling learning objectives and readings led to better alignment with assignments.
My old version of the course included the topics of poverty, aid, economic growth, economic geography, corruption, and ethnic conflict. For the new version, I abandoned the last three of these as learning objectives. This allowed me to discard corresponding chapters from William Easterly’s The Elusive Quest For Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT Press, 2001), plus other, shorter readings.
The old course had content organized under headings like “economic institutions” and “economic behavior.” While I am intricately familiar with these terms, students are not. As learning objectives, they are too broad. “Barriers to entrepreneurship” is more useful. As I mentioned in Part 2, students will see each of these objectives as a meta-prompts for reading responses, which are also now more specific. For example, in the portion of the syllabus where I am still using Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (Public Affairs, 2011):
Old assignment A
- Bannerjee and Duflo, Ch. 6-7, p. 133-182.
- MRU: Finance and Growth
- MRU: Introduction to Microfinance (Portfolios of the Poor)
- The Economist, “Seeding the Market,” 14 March 2015.
- Tina Rosenberg, “The Microinsurance Revolution,” The New York Times, 6 June 2012.
Why don’t the poor create their own microfinance institutions, instead of “waiting” for outsiders to do it for them?
New assignment A
Purpose of this response: learn about the role of insurance in mitigating economic risk.
- Bannerjee and Duflo, Ch. 6, p. 133-156.
- Gardiner Harris, “Borrowed Time on Disappearing Land,” New York Times, 28 March 2014.
- Brooke Jarvis, “When Rising Seas Transform Risk Into Certainty,” The New York Times, 18 April 2017.
Can insurance help Bangladeshis minimize economic risk? Why? What about people living in Norfolk and Houston? Why?
Old assignment B
- Bannerjee and Duflo, Ch. 10 and Conclusion, p. 235-274.
Is the pessimism of the Acemoglu and Robinson development model correct? Why?
New assignment B
Purpose of this response: learn about the effectiveness of public policy in a changing natural environment.
- Bannerjee and Duflo, Ch. 10 and Conclusion.
- Richard Conniff, “The Vanishing Nile: A Great River Faces a Multitude of Threats,” Yale Environment 360, 6 April 2017.
- Community Water Solutions, “Empowering Women Entrepreneurs to End the World Water Crisis,” 5 April 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zUBOLzfrQo.
Will small, decentralized, community-based changes lead to large-scale sustainable economic development? Why?
Links to the full series of posts on redesigning this course: