One of the most important things that I wished to achieve in my online course is to give students the best possible learning experience. In my face-to-face upper level courses, I emphasize applied learning; students must gather the most current data, present it in clear fashion, and analyze data using Excel. I most definitely do not wish to create an online course where students simply need to do the assigned readings and then answers multiple choice questions or write essays based on a set of standard questions. I want my online students, to learn the same material and skills that I would teach in a regular classroom setting – and possibly more.

To this end, I prepared numerous video lectures where I showed students how to answer my problem set questions. In these videos I not only teach them the technical skills, but also comment on the graphs and tables that were created. I try to show students how to first describe the data and how to critically think about it. What does this data say? What does this number mean? How do any of these findings connect to the things we are learning in the course? Or to things you hear in the media?

Based on the comments in my teaching evaluations, it seems that this has been a pretty successful approach. Here is a sample of some of the student comments made in my Fall 2018, Labor Economics course.
• “The instructor was very good with questions. When students had questions she would follow up with instructional videos which was very helpful since this is an online course.”
• “…Along with video tutorials as instructions on how to complete various graphs and Excel documents by the far the best the explanations I’ve ever receive at SUNY Old Westbury.”
• “She did videos for our online course explaining exactly how to do everything which I thought was very helpful.”
• “The screencast videos which went over lessons were by far the best touch to an online class experience I have ever had.”
• “…Great videos and lectures to drive home the information.”
• “The strengths of this course is the flexibility and the learning resources available to students. The professor gives students a fair amount of time to complete assignments and even created screencast videos walking student through lessons and showing what is expected.”

In the Fall 2019, I developed and taught another upper level elective course – Urban Economics. As in my Labor Economics course, I also developed several video lectures and instructions. In addition, I created, what I believe, a very innovative research project.

The project consisted of a policy proposal on an urban economics issue. It had to be specific and policy related to New York City, Nassau or Suffolk County. The students were also encouraged to compare and contrast those issues with other cities across the globe. The policy proposal had to be clearly structured, have a policy recommendation, as well as a clear discussion of the argument in favor and against its implementation. The argument should be based on relevant data and theory.

This project was split in two parts.

Part 1: PhotoVoice
PhotoVoice is a research method in which a person photographs their surroundings to increase knowledge of topics important to them. There are three (3) main purposes of PhotoVoice:
1. Give voice—through photographs— to people to document their community’s strengths as well as areas of concern
2. Encourage dialogue and raise awareness about issues of concern at population level
3. Spur change at the population level
Students had to take six photos related to their Urban Policy Issue. At least two of the photos should show strengths and characteristics of their community that positively contribute to the issue. And, at least two photos should show weaknesses and negative characteristics of the issue. The 5th and 6th photos can be positive or negative—their choice. Each photograph had to be title and have a 1-2 sentence description.

Part 2: The Web Site
The final product should be a well written website that includes all the relevant information about the topic, the policy question and proposal. In addition, it must also include other material - this can include links to articles, photos, graphs, data, videos, podcasts, etc.

I believe that students really enjoyed this course based on the comments they made in my teaching evaluations:
• “I love love love this course!!! I am so much more than glad that I took it. I will and am using what I have learned so far as much as I can. I think everyone should take this course.”
• “Instructor gives assignments that are very quick to learn and homework that are related to the material.”
• “This course provides some of the most directly relevant information about the state of our world today, how it got that way, and what we need to do for a sustainable future. The material provided were excellent.”
• “Professor Dolar is very educated in her field. She is communicative and put a lot of effort to put together this online course. I have learned so much thought her ways of teaching and it made taking an online class a very pleasant experience. “

As part of this course, I created a website where students were able to find all the relevant information about the course – please see my Welcome to the Course page (http://urbaneconomicspe4409.weebly.com/welcome-to-the-course.html). There you will see my short videos that I created back in my home country Slovenia to welcome students to the course. In addition, this website serves as a model to what students can create for their own final project.

In addition, I created several videos that show students how to create their own websites and how to search for Open Educational Resources (OER).
For more please see: http://urbaneconomicspe4409.weebly.com/how-to-create-a-website.html

Finally, please visit the following site where you can view the amazing websites students have created for this project:
http://urbaneconomicspe4409.weebly.com/students-work.html

http://urbaneconomicspe4409.weebly.com/

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1hKGsSfajWNDxcJHZDaoXmSU6bNmuS_P3