User:Brianevans

About Me
Hello.

I teach Economics at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California. I have been there 7 years and teach 3 courses: Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, and the Global Economy. Econ is a great subject to teach because students come in thinking it will be extremely hard and boring. They are only half right. It is really boring.

No no no... the other half. It is hard for many to catch on to the economic “way of thinking” but despite the difficulties almost all students find the class much more interesting than they had anticipated. In fact, I get this comment from someone almost every quarter. I was on professional development leave (PDL, or, sabbatical) in Spring 2009. We spent much of it in Japan. My wife is Japanese and this allows her parents to spend some quality time with their grandkids. We have a 5 yr old boy and a 1 year old girl.

During my PDL I switched my courses entirely to online Open Educational Resources (OER). This process has instilled in me a desire to learn more about OER and find / contribute to econ-related OER content. My first contribution is Economics Textbooks Free and Online - in which I try to distill all the "free economic textbook lists" I find on the internet into one that is usable for instructors of Intro Econ. Each instructor saves our students tens of thousands of dollars each year if we adopt free content.

I am also actively fighting an effort to impose Intermediate Algebra pre-requisites on Introductory Economics classes in California. Here is a letter I wrote and sent out to other teachers in April 2009. And here is a subsequent letter I sent to the CSU Economics chairs in June 2009 (as they are the one's who determine the LDTP). Here is a bullet list of points.

Brian

My Wikieductator Projects
/My sandbox/

Brian's Pro-D Interests

My Reflections


WikiEducator News & Events
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Notes from my WikiNeighbours
Hi Brianevans , I'm your WikiNeighbour. Welcome to the EL4C22 5-day advanced Workshop. Please let me know if I can be of any help to you.Nedal Shatat

Hi, Brian, I used to work for the American Association of Community Colleges, so I've even visited Foothills College. Sounds like you are doing great work. Thanks for introducing me to Flatworld.com--I hadn't heard of that before. Carol Cross

Thank you for your message Brian, sorry I did not see it earlier. You are fine uploading images now. I am assuming it is your daughter. Mine has just boarded a ship on her vessel tour. I am in Kanagawa and here for good it seems.--Nadia El Borai 15:36, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Hi, Brian-- AACC is the overall association for community colleges, so it has a very broad scope. Probably the unit within AACC that would be the best to approach on that matter is the Instructional Telecommunications Council, or ITC. Their website is: http://www.itcnetwork.org/. Hope this helps--Carol Carol Cross