Final Post
Having some prior experience with an Econ 490 course, I
expected this class to be almost all theory. To my surprise, Econ of
Organizations offered a balance between the theory and applications of
organizations. I had no prior knowledge beforehand of the great effect that
organizations played within firms and the overall market and I was introduced
to its effects from the first week of the semester. For example, I became
immediately intrigued with the class when I found out that improper
organization and coordination played a big factor in the collapse of the Soviet
Union. It also surprised me how small companies could compete with larger
corporations and even surpass them in production with proper organization.
Coming into the class, I was unaware on how complicated
organization can become. I always believed that organizing was just a matter of
shifting the allocation of resources, yet this class showed me how much one has
to consider when coordinating organization. For example, certain aspects such
as being low or high risk, such as in insurance, must be consider when making
choices.
The live class was structured like your typical
discussion class would be. It was small enough that it allowed students to ask
question and have them answered in class. Though most of the time only a few,
and sometimes the same students were the ones discussing, the class did
encourage student involvement. What I did like from the live class was that it
covered the topics we encountered in the excel homework and the blogs,
something that is not always the case in college classes. It was a nice change
since we are usually given textbooks and forced to learn a good chunk of the
material on our own in other classes.
What was one of the most unique aspects of the class was
the blogging. Though I hate writing, I found the blogging quite beneficial
since it allowed students to apply what they learned to the real life events
that they’ve had. The blogging also served as a method for us to reflect if we
really understood our readings or what we were shown in class since we had to
really understand for us to be able to apply those aspects to our stories.
In my case, writing my blog would take an average of
three hours since the process would compromise of other work besides the pure
writing. I would usually take sometime reflecting on applicable life events and
would usually review some of the economic terms or lessons we had learned
throughout the week in order to properly create a connection.
I’ve had prior classes that required me to work with
excel but this excel homework was by far the most unique I’ve encountered
through my college career. It was unique in the sense that it offered an in
depth explanation of the material that would be covered in the upcoming
questions, not only that, but once you arrived to the correct answer excel
would give an explanation on why that was that was the correct answer. It was
also interesting how excel would automatically modify itself and add graphs
once the correct answer was achieved. There was a few things that at times were
confusing within the excel homework but questions were quickly answered in the
discussion posts. On average, the excel homework would take about an hour,
though there were about two that took more than that.
Besides the blogging and the excel homework, this class
offered other resources as well. PowerPoint’s were available explaining the
lessons we learned in class. We also had videos that explained things we missed
or didn’t cover as in depth in class. To even further complement those
resources we had the two required textbooks that explained economic terms in
depth just incase we needed to review certain aspects of the class.
One thing I would have loved to have seen in class is a
project were groups managed their own virtual firm. I think such a project, if
possible, would have given students real practice on how to coordinate and
allocate resources to develop a successful firm.
