410 Economics: WinEcon—A New Generation Computer Package for Introductory Economics

totalling £22.5 million (approx. $34 million)1for the development of technology-based learning materials for undergraduate education through the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP). Under this initiative a consortium of economics departments was granted £640 thousand (approx. $1 million) funding to produce a com-puter-based learning package for teaching introductory economics. This program, called WinEcon,will be provided free of charge to all U.K. higher-education economics depart-ments in September 1995 and will be the first such package to cover the whole syllabus for first-year courses in economics. The consortium is committed to sharing the out-comes of its work with colleagues m other countries. In particular the consortium plans to develop a U.S. version of the software in collaboration with American coauthors. In this paper we describe the approach that the consortium has adopted in the devel-opment of WinEcon, its features and uses, as well as an assessment of its likely impact on student learning. Keywords Computer-based learning, introductory economics, user modes, flexibility. Good educational software should be capable of meeting the needs of a variety of users and of delivering learning solutions in a number of different contexts. Educational software also needs to appeal to student users as well as to lecturing staff, and it must have the flexi-bility to mold to the way lecturers teach and students learn, not require them to fit around the software. With small-scale software-development projects it is often not possible to encompass each of these design goals, so does more substantial funding produce more flexible software? A project funded in the United Kingdom to develop new teaching material for courses in introductory economics seeks to deliver a software product, WinEcon, which provides these levels of flexibility