I am part of an INET-sponsored group that has been considering whether and how a collapse of the Euro can be prevented. Details of our discussions to date are available here.
Year: 2012
The programme for this year’s event, being organised and hosted in UCC, is available on this link. Details below or on the website.
“University College Cork‘s (UCC) School of Economics are pleased to host the Irish Society of New Economists (ISNE) 9th annual conference.
The conference will take place on Thursday 23rd and Friday 24th of August, 2012.
If you wish to contact the local organising committee they can be contacted at isne2012@gmail.com.
The ISNE was formed to encourage research, information and social links among economists at the early stages of their careers in Ireland and Europe. The annual conference is intended for Masters, PhD students, and young professionals in the early stages of research. Eligibility to present has nothing to do with age. We strongly encourage those working on economics-related research in all settings to present.
The 2012 ISNE meeting will feature the work and findings of scholars in economics, econometrics and related fields, and will provide an excellent opportunity to present your own research results and work in progress.
We would encourage those who are participating in the conference or those who can not attend the conference this year to join the ISNE 2012 conference Linkedin group. This will allow a forum for discussion and announcements relating to the conference. To join the Linkedin group please simply click the Linkedin tab below. Linkedin
We look forward to meeting you in Cork in 2012.
The Local Organising Committee:
Robbie Butler (Lecturer in Economics UCC)
David Butler (Lecturer in Economics UCC)
Justin Doran (Lecturer in Economics UCC)”
I looked today at the Coursera list of upcoming courses. Coursera, from their own description, are “a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.” They are the most prominent of a number of recent initiatives to make very high quality education available to large online audiences (see e.g. the recent Harvard-MIT edx initiative).
I post this for a couple of reasons:
Firstly, many of the 111 currently listed upcoming courses will be of interest to readers of this blog. There are several courses in Economics including: Game Theory, Microeconomics, Behavioural Economics (taught by Dan Ariely) and several others. They are all free and all taught by well-known Professors in the field. Some even provide certificates of completion, homework assignments, quizzes and exams.
The second reason for posting is to ask what this implies for traditional higher education. There is clearly one school of thought that says the game is up for on-campus education now that the technology for doing this online has come to the point where Coursera can make flexible courses available free for millions of people. And yet, there is no sense yet of a flight from traditional universities and models of delivering higher education. There are so many barriers between making great courses available online and creating full programmes that are validated, credible in terms of assessment and desirable for students in terms of providing a full experience of education, including being able to work with peers, build a network, receive in-person instruction and so on. None of these seem insurmountable so one scenario might be a fully online university environment. Tyler Cowen summarises a discussion among a number of people who have been debating this issue in the US. He comes down on a viewpoint I share (largely from intuition as we really dont have anyway of knowing yet) that hybrid models will begin to proliferate soon merging online instruction with on-campus instruction.
Addendum: Berkeley joins Edx. List of courses here.