Last Tuesday, August 25th, Iowa OER hosted our second webinar of Fall 2020 with Matthew Clancy, Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Economics at Iowa State University. Matthew has experience working with both OER and other free resources in his teaching, and joined us to discuss his work using the LearnItFast website and the free CORE Econ project’s introductory book for microeconomics, The Economy.
Matt began by discussing spaced repetition, how repeating and returning to important content improves learning over time, rather than learning a topic once and hoping that learners will retain and study that content before an exam. To make this type of learning more accessible for his students, Matt utilizes the online tool, LearnItFast.
What is LearnItFast?
LearnItFast is a free program run by a small team based out of Ukraine. On their homepage, they mention that the tool can be used for any kind of learning, from recipes to full courses, though it is structured well for a traditional online class. Matt uses this tool for his Intermediate Microeconomics course, ECON 301, at Iowa State University. The basic process is that the instructor (Matt, in this case) sets up a series of short video lectures available on YouTube and self-check exercises for students who can then review and repeat the material until the learner feels comfortable in their understanding. As Matt states,
I like that [the exercises] are just self-assessed, because then you can get complicated questions like “explain the intuition” that can be very hard to devise as a multiple choice or a fill-in-the-blank question like that, but if it’s just self-assessed, when they click “show answer,” [learners] can judge for themselves if they had an answer [correct] or not.
Students must set up individual accounts on the website to take advantage of this feedback, but the accounts are free and this allows learners to get individualized support from the system as it repeats questions that they answered incorrectly in the past. More specific information and an example of this process in action can be seen in the webinar’s recording above.
If you’re interested in using LearnItFast in a course, check out the LearnItFast tutorials webpage.
How is this different from a typical OER?
For all intents and purposes, LearnItFast is a practically open resource, but it lacks the licensing that mandates openness in most OER.
In an open educational resource, you will see at some point an attribution like this:
“What is an open license and how does it work?” by The Council of Chief State School Officers is licensed CC BY 4.0.
This explains that the resource is available under a Creative Commons copyright license that allows for free adaptation of the work by other users. You can learn more about CC licenses in the OER Starter Kit.
In contrast, LearnItFast has no explicit licensing on its content. While material shared on the site might be made available freely under an open license (like Matt’s YouTube videos), not all content shared through the platform will have the same licensing. Instead of legal openness, LearnItFast has a practical openness to its platform. As the site itself explains:
We value brilliant individuals. A community of brilliant individuals is even better. That’s why we made editing courses available to all users. And all the courses are visible to others by default.
Although LearnItFast isn’t explicitly an OER platform, it is still an excellent, free resource that we’d recommend using if you’re interested. In addition, if you’d like to encourage open collaboration and adaptation of your projects in the future, adding a Creative Commons license to your LearnItFast course and sharing it through OER Commons may help drive interest in both the tool and your work!
What is Core Econ?
In addition to LearnItFast, Matt also discussed an open Economics textbook he adopted for ECON 101 at Iowa State University last year. The Economy, a textbook released by Core-Econ, takes a more human-centered approach to the topic of economics, focusing on real-world issues and problems that affect the ways in which the economy works.
As they describe themselves, Core-Econ is “an open-access platform for anyone who wants to understand the economics of innovation, inequality, environmental sustainability, and more.” In addition to The Economy, Core-Econ provides other textbooks which focus on different aspects of economics, including Doing Economics and Economy, Society, and Public Policy.
Further Reading
The two resources that Matt shared in his presentation are both excellent examples of tools created for a specific purpose. This month we want to highlight a few additional open resources that can be used in Micro- and Macroeconomics classrooms.