My first attempt at flipping Mathematical Economics 1 starts today. This is a unit for Master students - obviously - in economics covering basic calculus, linear algebra, matrices, constrained and unconstrained optimisation, and a bit of differential and difference equations. The preparation took a fair amount time mostly due to the need of finding the right technology for doing this. I decided to use on PowerPoint because I can easily record my voice on the slides, keep the timing of the presentation and create a film. In my first attempt, I tried to record the screen of my laptop while writing on a tablet. This was cumbersome, my handwriting was not good and the graphs funny and imprecise.
PowerPoint allows me to record short lectures with clear equations and graphs without any complicated technology. Google presentations does not support this feature so was quickly excluded.
Information for the students, including references and links to material, are provided using Google Docs. They are easy to update and share.
Online quizzes are essential to identify what needs to be practiced in the classes. Quizzes were and are a problem! In the end, I used Google Forms, but they are far from ideal. The problem is that I cannot type maths in Google Forms and need to use an elaborate procedure: I use an external maths editor to create a picture of an formula which is then included in Google Forms. Since pictures cannot be inserted in-line the questions are often unnatural. It is also easy to make mistakes and laborious to correct them. A Microsoft alternative to Google Forms allows for writing better equations - not in-line - but is much more constraining in its use. Other alternatives look very flashy but are pretty useless for mathematical quizzes in my view.
Short lectures ranging from 1m to 20m are uploaded on YouTube as unlisted videos - I am too much of a wimp to make them public.
I will shortly find out whether this approach to teaching Mathematical Economics 1 works …