Cengage Success Story
When faculty members receive stipends for adopting OER or Cengage Unlimited materials, they must submit final reports indicating how students responded to the new course materials. In the vast majority of final reports, students responded positively to the new course content.
Of course there are many factors which influence student experience. Faculty in these cases are introducing fresh content in re-tooled courses for which they are receiving a stipend. We would expect faculty to be motivated and student responses to reflect faculty excitement. That said, student responses in many cases are remarkably positive.
Cengage Unlimited in Principles of Macroeconomics
Professor Ariel Belasen in the School of Business implemented a new-to-the-course digital textbook available through the Cengage Unlimited package in the Spring Semester of 2024 for Economics 111, Principles of Macroeconomics.
The course typically is one of the most challenging courses for students on campus. Historically, it has relatively high rates of students dropping or (more rarely) failing the course when compared to campus averages. The text used was Principles of Macroeconomics by Gregory Mankiw, Ph.D.
Although Cengage Unlimited content is not free, once SIUE made the decision to subscribe to the package, all content under the Cengage Unlimited imprint became available to students at no additional cost. In other words, this text is “practically free,” and it freed up Prof. Belasen to update his course to be as engaging as possible.
“I taught the course in an unorthodox method to help students understand why macroeconomics is important to them even if they never plan to take another course in economics. We began each week with a discussion about a current event taken right from the morning headlines. Sometimes it would be blatantly obvious why it would be a relevant topic, e.g. new inflation numbers; a jobs report; or a story about sagging GDP growth in Europe. Other times it would not be so obvious, e.g. a new front in the Ukraine War; a story about the latest political debates; or a story about a disaster striking a developing nation. Each time we would discuss the story and then I would connect it to a macroeconomics topic.
The following class I would deliver a lecture about the underlying theory and application of that topic as well as assign several low stakes exercises for the students.
The remainder of the grade was determined by three longer exams each covering the prior four weeks of material.
This would have been much more challenging without the customization options in the Cengage Unlimited shell. I was able to swap the order of textbook chapters to match the weekly content I delivered. I was able to make use of the four(!) sets of associated questions through the digital content to set up the low stakes homework assignment and quiz.
I was also able to embed a recording of our current events discussion along with my lecture directly into the digital content so that students could connect the concepts we covered in the discussion and lecture to those same concepts and problems from the textbook. It was 100% seamless.
