Author: Hossein S. Kazemi
Associate Professor of Economics
Stonehill College
Department of Economics
320 Washington St.
Easton, MA 02357
Phone: 508-565-1276
Fax: 508-565-1444
Email: kazemi@stonehill.edu
The author has been using Bloomberg in a series of Economics and Finance classes over the course of the past 15 years at four of the major Boston and Cambridge area colleges in business, economics and school of management. The primary inspiration in doing this has to do with the notion that Economics students do not have the same luxury as science students do when it comes to their appreciation of the way variables or agents interact with one another through utilization of labs available to them. Most courses in economics and finance are taught using chalk-and-talk method or power-point presentations. There are a very small percentage of courses that are taught using games, simulations or experimental learning methods. The efficacy of these techniques is a function of time and resources devoted to them and often perceived by administrators to be anecdotal at best. This paper presents a methodical way of using the technology as a tool of teaching economics and finance. Using a sample of courses taught by the author as individual experiments, the efficacy of this teaching technique on students’ learning versus the conventional methods is examined. The results suggest that students learn and retain what they have been taught significantly better through this approach. Furthermore, their comprehension of the material is a great deal deeper both theoretically and applied.