An Active Object-Based Digital Library for Microeconomics Education

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Students from a variety of disciplines take Microeconomics courses to learn how various types of markets function and how enterprises and consumers make buying and selling decisions in these markets. As such, Microeconomics education plays an important role in preparing future business leaders and practitioners and serves as part of general business and social sciences training for students in other fields of study. Currently, Microeconomics courses are typically taught in a traditional lecture format. Recent developments in economic theory and electronic commerce, however, call for significant innovations in course content design and delivery. An emerging trend is to allow the students to actively participate in economic decision-making through various market institutions, including recently emerging Internet-based online market institutions, to gain hands-on experience and acquire economic insights. Constructivist learning theory supports this educational approach. It promises to revolutionize the way in which Microeconomics courses will be taught in this new Millennium. Although several efforts have been initiated to create online Microeconomics contents, including experimentation tools and software, they have been developed in a system development and content collection paradigm that is closed and therefore cannot scale. In this project we are creating a Digital Library (DL)-based, open approach to deal with the challenges of developing an extensible and scalable collection of Microeconomics related contents. (a) From the perspective of the application domain, i.e., Microeconomics, we are making contributions in creating new types of digital contents, including simulated IT-enhanced market institutions and intelligent trading systems implemented as software agents. These agents are emerging as part of the IT-enhanced electronic market institutions that have the potential of greatly reducing economic transaction costs and improving the quality of economic decision-making. (b) From the viewpoint of the National STEM Digital Library, we are creating an Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant collection of Microeconomics education contents that incorporates experimental software and automated e-commerce agents. A major DL research task that we are undertaking is the development of a metadata representation of active objects such as software modules (e.g., economics experimental software). This research has the potential of being applied in other DL collections involving software and simulation environments. (c) From the educational viewpoint, we are developing new integrated Microeconomics curricula leveraging the developed active objected-based DL. We are studying the impact of these new curricula, and investigating related changes in course management and teaching methodologies. We are combining research, teaching, and evaluation expertise and resources from several academic departments and labs at the University of Arizona. Four key contributing entities are: (1) the Economic Science Lab, a premier institution on experimental economics methodology and applications, (2) the Artificial Intelligence Lab, a leading institution on DL, Internet computing, and software agents, (3) the Hoffman E- Commerce Lab, an instructional and research facility focusing on e-commerce teaching and research, and (4) the University Faculty Center for Instructional Innovation, a teaching evaluation facility with emphasis on the impact of IT on education.