SPP Assistant Professor Michael Dorsch attended a seminar for the CORE curriculum project in November.
Hosted by HM Treasury in the UK and funded by the Institute for New Economic Teaching, the project to create a new core curriculum for economics came about as a response to widespread discontent among students, employers and university teachers.
CORE stands for Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics. The project provides a new approach to the design, content and way of teaching the core economics curriculum for undergraduates. The CORE project’s first task will be to deliver a pilot of a new first-year undergraduate “Introduction to Economics” course, to be taught in participating universities during the 2014-2015 academic year.
The CORE project will produce open access on-line resources, including e-book course material for students with interactive content including diagrams, data and videos. It is being developed by an international team of academics under the leadership of Professor Wendy Carlin of the Department of Economics, University College London, with technical support from Azim Premji University in Bangalore. The course materials, plus supporting teaching materials, will be available at no cost to participating institutions. Instructors will be free to adapt them to their local needs.
The CORE curriculum will equip students to understand how the economy has evolved and how it works by bringing advances in economics research over the past three decades, lessons from economic history and the comparative experience of different countries into the curriculum. Students will be encouraged to develop their ability to use economics for understanding problems that are important to them and for engaging with policy debates.