Syllabus
Students enrolled in this course can find a more specific syllabus for their course on blackboard.
Course Objectives
Our overall objective for this course is to try and answer, from a systems perspective, the basic questions that arise from the definition of economics proposed above, then apply these answers to addressing real life problems. The basic questions are:
- What are the desirable ends towards which society should allocate its scarce resources?
- What are the available resources, and what are their characteristics relevant to allocation?
- Based on the nature of the available resources, human nature, and available institutions (those that currently exist or that we can create) what allocative mechanisms are best for achieving these desired ends?
Specific objectives required to achieve this include:
- Construct the pre-analytic vision of ecological economics and a vision of a sustainable and desirable future. The former tells us what ends are possible, the latter what ends are desirable.
- Formulate a whole systems approach to ecosystem structure and function. We use the laws of physics and ecology to identify and understand the available resources.
- Formulate a whole system approach to the human subsystem structure and function. We must assess human behavior and institutions in order to identify the best options for resource allocation.
- Evaluate and design policy tools based on ecological economic principles. These are the tools required to address the real life problems you will be working on.
What You’ll Need to Take This Course
- Textbook: ”Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications” by Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley. ISBN:1559633123
- Workbook: “Ecological Economics: A Workbook For Problem-Based Learning” by Joshua Farley, Jon Erickson, Herman E. Daly.
- A PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat (free download here).
- Any audio browser plugins that can play mp3 files and watch movies.
- Skype software, (free download here), for online talking and instant messaging, when needed.
How the Course Works
As indicated above, this is a fully online class, which means that the whole course can be taken online via the Internet, without ever meeting face-to-face (web course developers call this “F2F"). As a means to communicate more directly, we will have skype calls once a week. In addition, students will NEED to communicate with each other (preferably via Skype) to complete some of the assignments and the project. However, the main part of the course and its content will be implemented via the Internet using Email, the class website, a class discussions, and class wikis. Detailed instructions are provided throughout, but if you have questions, confusions, or suggestions, PLEASE email Ida so that she can make adjustments and clarifications.
This course is set up run off two sites, this public site that you are currently on and at which all the content resides on, and the UVM blackboard site; this is only for registered users. The blackboard site is where you get the opportunity to interact with the instructors and other students enrolled in the course. Any assignments or discussions will be handed in through the blackboard site. The connection between the two sites will be clear as you proceed through the course.
Feel free to go through the content of this course at your own pace. The blackboard site is only necessary for those that are taking the course for credit.
Whether you register for the course through the University of Vermont or are taking the course independently, begin on this site with the first module.
The course is divided into modules and sub-modules. These contain assignments which will be due approximately every two weeks. An exact schedule for deadlines can be found on the Blackboard site. This is a graduate class, so we expect you to engage with the material without any additional prompts from the professors (like minus grading points for being late).
Grading
Please contact the professors for questions about grading. As noted above, we are focused on learning and not grading, so we have a general approach indicated below.
Participation (50%)
- Participate in skype calls
- Contribute to the wikis of each module
- Contribute to the blackboard discussions of each module
- Lead and summarize at least one discussion. To avoid overlap, in the first week of class choose which discussion you would like to lead and post your choice on the first discussion board so that everyone in the class can see. DO NOT choose a topic that has already been chosen (i.e. first come-first served).
Project (50%)
- The purpose of the project is to synthesize and apply what you are learning and make a positive contribution to the field of ecological economics. This can be in any area of research or practice.
- You can do projects either individually or in groups.
- For this course, we want you to contribute a piece to the Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE) in a special “collection” on Ecological Economics. See http://www.eoearth.org/article/Ecological_Economics_(collection). There is an outline at this site that will give you an idea of the range of topics available. Surf through the rest of the EoE to get a feel for what the articles are like. You can think of your piece as sort of a review of one of these topics, written for an educated lay audience. If you can explain it well to that audience, you probably have learned it. To avoid overlap, post your topic to the class as soon as you have chosen one, and don’t choose a topic that has already been chosen (i.e. first come-first served). If you want to choose a topic that is not in the outline but you think should be, just suggest it to us and we’ll let you know if we think it fits.
- You should settle on a project early in the course to give you enough time to do it during the course. If the project needs to extend past the end of the course we understand. For example, you may have a draft of an entry done by the end of the course, but submission to EoE for review and final publication might take some time after that. Don’t worry. Your grade will reflect how far you have come and our expectations for you carrying it through to publication.
