Economics: FSU

How do you enable everyone in a large class to take part in experiments?

Overview.

Objective:

Increase student involvement in practical experiments.

Client:

Dr. Joe Calhoun, Director of Stavros Center for Economic Education, Florida State University.

Summary:

Students complete economics experiments as homework assignments. Their progress is monitored throughout the course via UniVirtual’s LMS, then translated into a grade at the end of the semester.

Outcome:

All 2,000 of Dr. Calhoun’s students are now actively engaged with course material, and their progress is monitored in detail.


Each year, around 2,000 students enroll in Dr. Joe Calhoun’s micro and macroeconomics classes. They took these classes in an auditorium seating 500 students, so time and space for physical experiments were limited. Usually, about 10 volunteers were able to come up to the front to participate in the experiment, so the remaining 490 could only watch.

Dr. Calhoun wanted to enable all of his students to participate in practical experiments without making the classes longer and more chaotic. He hoped moving to an online environment might be the solution and contacted UniVirtual to see if we could help.

Process.

Working with Dr. Calhoun, we devised a series of economic “experiments” taking place in the metaverse. Students work through the modules outside of class as homework assignments, and their progress throughout the course is monitored via the student’s Heads-Up Display and translated into a grade at the end of the semester. Some of these experiments had already been tested in classrooms, while others were devised from scratch. 

We housed a large number of the experiments in a fictional town that included a trading floor, restaurant, cinema, bank, barbershop, and grocery store. There is also a fishing hole by a lake in the countryside, used for an exercise on property rights. Other experiments took place in conceptual or abstract environments.

“At the beginning, I was thinking too small. UniVirtual wanted me to expand my possibilities. Once I caught on to that, I asked for all kinds of fun things and they were very happy to accommodate me. There wasn’t any kind of limitation; there really wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.”

— Dr. Joe Calhoun, Director of Stavros Center for Economic Education, Florida State University

Available Modules.

Results.

Outcome.

Dr. Calhoun’s course was launched in Fall 2017, and he is delighted with the result. His students are now actively engaged with course material, their individual progress is being monitored in detail, and there has been only a small increase in his workload.