ALAMOSA, CO. (October 17, 2014) – Dr. Ed Lyell, Adams State University Professor of Business, was one of 40 economic professors, from around the nation invited to a two-day conference, on October 10 and 11, on how to better teach economics using new digital tools.
Faculty presenters demonstrated their success using student produced videos, interactive and adaptive software, video game based learning and multimedia Power Points. “I was able to spend a lot of time with economics Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman talking about macro-economic conditions and policy change possibilities,” Lyell said.
Lyell found common ground with George Mason University Economist Alex Tabarrok, who made a compelling case for how higher education is being dramatically disrupted and changed with the digitization of learning. “Since online education has a very low marginal cost per student it would replace campus based learning, especially in rapidly growing Asian universities. Tabarrok said that hundreds of colleges would go out of business unless they learn to adapt and change to working with new digital learning tools and producers.”
Lyell said he has advocated, for decades, for much of what Tabarrok talked about, including competency based learning replacing time and seat-based systems. “It is also leading to new ‘star’ professors who create courses seen by hundreds of thousands of students each semester. One such economic professor in Korea now makes over four million dollars a year and reaches almost a million students.
The sessions were video-taped and will be posted on the Internet within the month so other professors can learn these new techniques of motivating students with social media and activity based multimedia tools,” Lyell said. He received his bachelor’s degree and Masters in Business Administration from San Francisco State and completed his doctorate at University of Colorado. For the last fifteen years, Lyell has taught Adams State students marketing, economics, management science, and systems design. “I have loved teaching since first teaching a MBA marketing management course in 1970.”
He has served as a senior administrator at the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, a higher education budget analyst for the Colorado legislature, and was elected to the Colorado State Board of Education, and served on the State Board for all community colleges in Colorado. Lyell has also traveled the nation and around the world as a consultant.
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