I first taught Economics 212 – Personal Investing online in Fall semester, 2013. I suffered the usual problems facing a neophyte, but the technical problems were not too bad, nor too frequent. I ended up delivering the content here on my own website, rather than on Learn because I think it stinks for content delivery. But it’s good at managing assessment and discussions, so the quizzes, homeworks and discussions were all hosted on the course Learn site.

With 70 students it was a big class by online standards, and I had a TA with no experience with online classes. (This is essential if you want to use your TA effectively.) Although I had a few students (about 10% I’d say) who were unhappy for one or more reasons (not the same for each student, so hard to address with a global course correction,) generally students reacted positively to the class measured by emails and feedback. That said, the weakest part of the course was the Discussions. It is hard to keep students engaged when access is asynchronous, and you cannot rely on self-correction. Something for me to work on in the future.

How did the students do? Below is the grade distribution. You can see that 13% of the students who started the course didn’t finish it. Of the 58 that finished the course only 4 (7%) failed or got below 500/1000. Over 48% got an A or A+. Since this is not an easy course, I like to think the grades reflect good learning, good performance, and a level of satisfaction with the educational experience.