Author: Liam Delaney

Coursera and Online Education

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.

Economics and Psychology One-Day Conference

The fifth annual one day conference on Economics and Psychology will be held on November 30th. The purpose of these sessions is to develop the link between Economics, Psychology and cognate disciplines in Ireland. A special theme of these events is the implications of behavioural economics for public policy though we welcome submissions across all areas of intersection of Economics and Psychology. We welcome submissions from PhD students as well as faculty and also welcome suggestions for sessions on policy and industry relevance of behavioural economics.  Abstracts (200-500 words) should be submitted before September 30th. Suggestions or questions please send to Liam.Delaney@stir.ac.uk and/or Pete.Lunn@esri.ie

Irish Economy Conference: Preliminary Notice

The podcasts and presentations from last year’s Irish Economy conference are available here. This will be run again in January 2013. The general reaction to the 2012 session was positive and we think it has a useful function and should be retained as an annual event held in January.  I wanted to post now to give time for discussion and suggestions for sessions. The layout will be similar to last year, with a potential for three parallel sessions depending on amount of quality speakers that are available. Comments on this blog directly influenced last year’s session so this is a good place and time to make general comments if people are interested in shaping the format and line-up. Alternatively, either me or Stephan Kinsella can be contacted with suggestions. Or use #ieconf as a hashtag on twitter

Amartya Sen on Austerity

An article by Amartya Sen in the Guardian on European economic policy  – link here

Orla Doyle Barrington Lecture

(from email by Sean Lyons)

A meeting of the Statistical & Social Inquiry Society of Ireland will take place on Wednesday, 18th April 2012, starting at 6:00 pm, in the Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2. Dr Orla Doyle (UCD School of Economics and Geary Institute) will present a paper titled Breaking the Cycle of Deprivation: An Experimental Evaluation of an Early Childhood Intervention.

The abstract is set out below and a draft of the paper is available here.

Abstract:
Deprivation early in life has multiple long term consequences for both the individual and society. An increasing body of evidence finds that targeted, early interventions aimed at at-risk children and their families can reduce socioeconomic inequalities in children’s skills and capabilities. This paper describes a randomised control trial (RCT) evaluation of a five-year preventative programme which aims to improve the school readiness skills of socioeconomically disadvantaged children. The Preparing for Life (PFL) programme is one of the first studies in Ireland to use random assignment to experimentally modify the environment of high risk families and track its impact over time. This paper describes the design and motivation for the study, the randomisation procedure adopted and the baseline data collected. Using Monte Carlo permutation testing, it finds that the randomisation procedure was successful as there are no systematic differences between the treatment and control groups at baseline. This indicates that future analysis of treatment effects over the course of the five year evaluation can be causally attributed to the programme and used to determine the impact of Preparing for Life on children’s school readiness skills.