Background: Why you should be excited about this learning adventure!
Background of the Common Sense Economics for Life
During the past decade, the Stavros Center for Economic Education of Florida State University has worked with a team of master economic educators to develop the Common Sense Economics for Life course. The primary contributors to this project include James Gwartney and Joe Calhoun (Florida State University), Tawni Ferrarini (Northern Michigan University), Mark Schug (University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee), John Morton (Arizona Council for Economic Education), and John Kessler (Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne). The developers have all spent their careers in education and most currently direct Centers of Economic Education. They have combined their expertise to achieve a single objective: the development and implementation of an exciting and understandable set of materials that focuses on what students really need to know about economics and personal finance.
The Common Sense Economics for Life course pairs the economics primer Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know about Wealth and Prosperity (St. Martin's Press, 2010) by Gwartney, Stroup, Lee, and Ferrarini with short video clips, classic readings, interesting podcasts, and practical assignments. The "read, watch, listen, and do” approach is used to make learning both easy and fun. The Stavros Center now offers this multi-media course regularly online and shares the materials with individuals throughout the U.S. and now around the globe.
This course is designed for individuals who want to learn economics in an engaging fashion. All of the videos, readings, audios, and other materials needed for the course can be accessed through Moodle. The Common Sense Economics (2010) textbook is available at both BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com for approximately $15.
The members of the Common Sense Economics for Life team recognize that the delivery of education is changing rapidly as innovative technology makes learning packages readily available to wider audiences at a relatively low cost. We want to lead this cutting edge change. Using multi-media technologies, our goal is to help individuals understand the economic way of thinking, how to use it to make healthy and wealthy decisions, and help economies grow and develop through sound principles of economics and personal finance. This course involves the pursuit of that goal.
This course is divided into 16 modules and four (4) parts: (1) key elements of the economic way of thinking, (2) the institutional environment for growth and prosperity, (3) economics and the role of government, and (4) personal finance. Each focuses on the things people need to know to live a more fulfilling life. Let's get started.
Enjoy the following videos to get an overview of why you should complete this course!