Tom Sargent and John Stachurski go online with a fascinating web based course in quantitative economic modeling.
Two thoughts. The education world is going online, but we're all in version 1.0 at best. Tom and John's website is an interestingly different paradigm than the online courses such as the Coursera platform that I'm using for an online asset pricing course. I'll be curious to see which elements of which paradigm survive. Or perhaps the Toms' webiste will become the "textbook" for Coursera type courses, which can then add videos, forums, a structured environment for plowing through the material, and the carrot of certification at the end.
The website is just gorgeous. Producing economic (and scientific) articles for viewing online has so far been a headache. Our journals produce beautiful pdf representations of.. printed pages. They might as well show 3-d images of a papyrus scroll. Math and tables in html as presented on most journal websites is just pathetically ugly. As I looked through this website, I'm enthused that 1) I need to learn python and 2) I need to learn to write my papers and textbooks in this gorgeous format.
