EconPortal is the digital gateway to Krugman/Wells Economics, designed to enrich your course, help you organize and better utilize resources, and improve your students' understanding of economics. EconPortal provides a powerful, easy-to-use, completely customizable teaching and learning management system complete with the following:
- An Interactive eBook with Embedded Learning Resources and Enhanced Assessment: The eBook's functionality will provide for highlighting, note-taking, graph and example enlargements, a fully searchable glossary, as well as a full text search. You can customize any eBook page with comments, external web links, and supplemental resources. Unlike most eBooks, which are static pages of text, this interactive eBook will bring the book to life with embedded icons that link directly to resources that include Tutorials, Graphing Exercises and Quizzes.
- Student Tutorials will be available in coordination with key topics in the text. The tutorials are meant to provide a detailed, guided tour through a specific concept. They will cover topics that students typically have trouble understanding or concepts that require more class time to fully explain. They'll bring these concepts to life with pictures, animations and useful worked-out examples. These tutorials would be available to students as a self-guided resource. Optional assessment will be tied to each tutorial to assess whether students have grasped the concepts presented you can choose how to use the tutorials to best meet your students' needs. Assigning these tutorials ensures that valuable class time isn't spent on remediation of topics already covered.
- A Personalized Study Plan for Students Featuring Diagnostic Quizzing: A Personalized Study Plan is available to assess students' knowledge of the material and to guide further study. Students will be asked to take the PSP: Self-Check Quiz after they have read the chapter and before they come to the lecture that discusses that chapter. Once they've taken the quiz, they can view their Personalized Study Plan based on the quiz results. This Personalized Study Plan will provide a path to the appropriate eBook materials and resources for further study and exploration.
- A Fully Integrated Learning Management System: The EconPortal is meant to be a one-stop shop for all the resources tied to the book. The system will carefully integrate the teaching and learning resources for the book into an easy-to-use system. The Assignment Center organizes preloaded assignments centered on a comprehensive course outline, but it also provides the flexibility for you to add your own assignments.
EconPortal will enable you to create assignments from a variety of question types to prepare self-graded homework, quizzes, or tests. Assignments may be created from the following:
- End-of-Chapter Quiz Questions: the Krugman/Wells end-of-chapter problems will be available in a self-graded format-perfect for quick in-class quizzes or homework assignments. The questions have been carefully edited to ensure that they maintain the integrity of the text's end-of-chapter problems.
- Algorithmic Questions: A question generator will be available that allows the variables of each question to be algorithmically generated-an ideal resource for creating randomized sets of quizzes and for ensuring that students get as much practice as they need.
- Graphing Questions: Pulled from our graphing tool engine, EconPortal can provide electronically gradable graphing-related problems. Students will be asked to draw their response to a question, and the software will grade their response. These graphing exercises are meant to replicate the pencil-and-paper experience of drawing graphs-with the bonus to you of not having to hand-grade each assignment.
- Multipart Assignments: This allows a great degree of flexibility in assigning sections of the eBook, Tutorials, Quizzes, or any resources available within the EconPortal as one complete assignment for your students to complete.
- Test Bank Questions: Assignments can be generated by pulling from the pool of Krugman/Wells Test Bank questions.
The EconPortal's Assignment Center will allow you to select your preferred policies for scheduling, maximum attempts, time limitations, feedback, and more. A wizard will guide you through the creation of assignments. You can assign and track any aspect of your students' EconPortal. The Gradebook will capture your students' results and allow for easily exporting reports.
The ready-to-use course can save you many hours of preparation time. It is fully customizable and highly interactive.