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Top2. Teaching Economics Online
There are abundant studies on teaching and learning economics at university level, comparing online method with personal lectures, or combining online and traditional teaching, with different results. One of the first of this studies, (Vachris, 1997) was, applied on Principles of Macroeconomics, (Harter & Harter, 2004), for an introductory economics course, neither of them found significant differences between online class and in a traditional lecture setting. On the other hand, some studies (Agarwal & Day, 1998; Navarro & Shoemaker, 2000) did report on improved performance in online environments. Diverse authors (Sosin, 1998; Brown & Liedholm, 2002; Anstine & Skidmore, 2005Gratton-Lavoie & Stanley, 2009), founded ambiguous results, concerning student’s background and type of studies.
Anyway, positive effect on students’ performance from the adoption of innovations in the technology of teaching and learning does not affect all teaching methods and learning styles equally, as it depends on university strategy and policy towards the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) adoption, students’ abilities, technology uses in the educational process by teachers and students, or the selection of a methodology that matches with digital uses (Castillo-Merino, Serradell-Lopez, & Gonzalez-Gonzalez, 2010).