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Teaching Outreach Conference

For the Instructors of Economic Theory Courses

General Description:
The Third Annual Conference “Economic Theory: Innovative Instruction and Research-Based Teaching”, held on March 24-25, 2006 was sponsored by the Economic Research and Outreach Center (EROC) and Economics Education and Research Consortium (EERC) with funding from the World Bank. The conference targeted instructors of economic theory courses at universities in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia and other countries Sessions were held in EERC classrooms on the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy (NaUKMA) campus.

Participants:
Overall, 48 economic educators participated in the conference (see Appendix 1 for the list of participants), including 29 participants from various regions of Ukraine, 3 from Belarus, 2 from Moldova, 4 from Georgia, 1 from Uzbekistan, 1 from Armenia, 2 from Azerbaijan, 1 from Armenia and 4 from Russia. Of those attending, 18 participants are currently enrolled in the EERC/EROC HESP project, which provided the financing to cover their costs of attending the conference (transportation, lodging, meals and materials). The other 30 participants were selected on the basis of their current teaching activities and received EROC grants to cover conference-related expenses.

Agenda and Content:
The choice of topics for the conference reflected suggestions made by participants of the previous conferences. The conference last year included several sessions devoted to the active learning methods that could be used in teaching economics: case-study methodology and experiments. This year several participants of the conference were invited to make presentations about their experience with using case-studies in teaching economics during the first session of the conference (Liudmila Konstants from American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyz Republic; Yevgeniy Orel from NaUKMA, Kyiv; Viktoriya Palekhova from Mykolayiv State Humanitarian University, Mykolayiv; Viktoriya Klymenko from National Aviation University, Kyiv). These presentations were followed by very active discussions and were repeatedly evaluated as very interesting.


For the second session the audience was split into two groups for active demonstrations of classroom experiments. One group participated in microeconomic experiments: “A Principal-Agent Game” (which focuses on labor contracts design) and “An Auction Market Game” (which demonstrates how free markets work). The second group participated in macroeconomic experiments: “A Credit Market Experiment” (which demonstrates the difference of the effects of real and nominal interest rates on aggregate investments), and “A Savings/Consumption Game” (which shows the impact of savings and consumption on aggregate output, unemployment and price level).


The third session of the conference included presentations by the US Embassy and IREX representatives about funding opportunities available from their institutions for instructors of economics. Then, Tom Coupe (EROC/EROC) talked about practical grant application hints and general techniques to produce successful grant proposals. Afterwards, a number of participants acknowledged that the information received during this session was truly useful.

The fourth session was devoted to course and teaching evaluations. Artem Panchenko (EERC Academic Affairs specialist) shared the experience of the EERC MA program in Economics in doing course and teaching evaluations. Volodymyr Vakhitov (EERC/University of Kentucky) talked about his experience with mid-semester evaluations done at the University of Kentucky. Victoriya Sereda (Ivan Franko Lviv National University) presented the results and challenges of course and teaching evaluation experiment carried out at Ivan Franko Lviv National University. For many conference participants the idea of formal teaching evaluations was rather novel, and raised active and sometimes controversial discussions.

The second day of the conference started with the presentation of problem-based learning approach, which is a relatively new teaching methodology that is getting recognition in different fields. Even though only a general introduction to the method was done during this session, the presentation provoked a vivid debate among the participants concerning its applicability to teaching economics.

The final two sessions of the conference were less formal in nature and included discussions of academic research practices in the US, Canadian and Western European universities, and comparisons to Ukrainian and other regional practices. Also, a number of issues related to the Bologna process in higher education, and the implications of the process for the economics curricula were discussed. These sessions offered the conference participants to actively debate on the most problematic aspects of the academic research practices and economics curricula in Ukraine and other regions compared to the world practices. The insights of the presenters who have working experience at the US (Sergiy Ilchuk, RAND), Canadian (Yuriy Yevdokimov, University of new Brunswick) and German (Timofey Mylovanov, University of Bonn) universities were found to be particularly helpful by the participants.

Some conference's presentations:

Download Draft Conference Agenda English (Ukrainian)

Conference photo gallery

Conference Administration:

Olesia Verchenko, Conference Chair

Conference report

Please, send your questions about the EROC Outreach conference to Olesia Verchenko at: outrconference@eerc.kiev.ua