Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Final chance for some blogging!

Hi all,

I hope you enjoyed the class. I'm glad that we had the opportunity, and have enjoyed reading your work. I must confess that I would have strongly preferred a face-to-face class.

Here's a final chance to get some blogging in:

What did you think of the course material?

What topic did you find the most interesting? Why?

What topic was the least interesting? Why?

Any topics that were confusing?

Were there topics that you would have liked to have seen covered but we didn't get to?
(My first pick here would be renewable energy, which I usually spend at least a couple of weeks on!)

Take good care and enjoy the rest of your summer!

4 comments:

Kendyll Goeman said...

I would have preferred a face to face class as well. This class was much more interesting than the course description. I took the class online because it was the only required class for my major that was offered online for the summer session. I wish that I had other online class options in order to have taken this class in a classroom setting. I could not stay in Wilmington like originally planned, and I wanted to still crank out some credits.
I really liked how the course material used real examples to explain the book topics. I think that the lectures were well worded and easy to follow, yet I would have definitely benefited from an in class lecture. I think that more questions would arise in a classroom setting. There were a lot of supplement materials available to research models and ideas that I had questions about, so online questions were minimal.
I found the topics of externalities and open access to be the most interesting. I really enjoyed looking at local Pigovian taxes and learning that pollution does have an effect on market good prices. As a volunteer researcher for the Nature Conservancy, I have sat in meetings where private land is donated to preservation efforts. Learning about use and non-use values and land rents helped me to understand why the Nature Conservancy is so important. Every lesson in this class ties together and is imperative to understand the following lesson. I have enjoyed applying what I have learned from lecture and Field’s textbook to the blog articles. I feel like I can use what I have learned to understand economic discrepancies in the news and contribute my positive analysis to intelligent conversations.
I’m not sure why, but the land rent lectures were the least interesting to me. This might have been the most confusing section. Thus, it was grueling to read and re-read. Math is not my forte, so any time math or formulas are presented online, I must spend more time on the material. A lot of students struggled with the land rent discussion question as well.
I would have liked to learn more about renewable energy or the economic policies of other developed countries. (Are they developing bag and tag systems? Are they having longline problems? Can we learn anything from their mistakes or successes?)

MSchaefer said...

I found this class to be challenging and I needed to stay on top of the lecture and readings. I never took an on-line class and had no idea what was expected.I liked how the economics subjects corresponded my previous class. I enjoyed the most is learning about the depletion of fisheries because I saw a documentary about the over fishing problem. I would like to have learned more about the economics of developing countries. This is where the population is growing and wants the same affluent life style of developed worlds that uses large quantities of natural resources.

Steph Carroll said...

I would have also very much preferred a face-to-face class. I thoroughly enjoyed the course and how it related real world enviornmental issues to my economics major. Unfortunately I felt the course was extremely short and that there were many topics we did not have a chance to cover.

I found all the topics to be extremely interesting, especially those containing details on how enviornmental standards and policies are implemented. I imagine some of the economic models were difficult for non-econ majors to follow, as I found myself confused a few times (especially on the forestry section!).

I have never taken an enviornmental class prior to this one and had no idea how much I would enjoy it. I wish I had longer than one semester left to graduate because I would definitely take another!

Juliana Yorio said...

The course material was thought provoking and presented itself in a clear and concise manner. I really enjoyed the online class setting and would do it again if I could. The topic that I found the most interesting dealt with the tropical rainforests (lecture 6.2). There was a lot of information concerning the economic causes for the rapid rate of tropical deforestation that I was not aware of before that lecture. The topic that was the least interesting to me dealt with the explanation of maximum sustainable yield (lecture 7.1). The information was confusing and hard for me to understand. Although, it is reasonable to conclude that it was one of the final lectures and my brain might have been tired.  Most of the topics covered I thoroughly enjoyed reading, but I would have liked to have read more environmental issues in connection to other countries.