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Pearson Education Materials

Workshops

These workshops, which have been provided by kind permission of Pearson Education, cover the main theoretical topics in Essentials of Economics (3rd edition). Each workshop is based on a chapter.

I have been running workshops similar to these for a number of years and finds them very popular with students and a good medium for learning and applying basic economic concepts. They can be run with very large groups of students in lecture theatres, or with smaller groups in seminar rooms. With large groups (up to 250), students can work through one or two questions, discussing them with their neighbours as they do them, and then the lecturer can go through the answers from the front. Then the students do another one or two questions, and so on. If you leave one row free in every three in the lecture theatre, tutors can go round giving help to students if they are stuck. This is a good way of using postgraduate teaching assistants.

Given the financial pressures that all departments face, large workshops are a very efficient use of staff resources. They can allow more staff/student contact and can enable seminar group sizes to be kept down. They permit the doing of exercises, which can quite satisfactorily take place in very large groups (in workshops) to be separated from the discussion of policy issues and other controversial topics, which require small groups (and which can, therefore, be covered in seminars). The variety of having lectures, workshops and seminars, and possibly sessions in computer labs using packages such as WinEcon, can make the learning of Economics much more appealing for students.

On semester courses, the workshops could be run weekly. On year-long courses, with only one lecture per week, the workshops could be organised on a fortnightly basis. I hope that you find them useful. There should be plenty of material in each workshop for an hour's session. Any questions that you do not have time to cover could be set as 'homework'.

I would welcome any feedback and suggestions for ways in which they could be improved.

John Sloman (john.sloman@uwe.ac.uk)