I am currently a university student, and last semester I took an international economics course. As most first lectures go I expected to sit down and listen to the professor tell us what we would be learning throughout the year and what books to buy. But this was quite different, I and many other students in the class experienced a wide range of emotions from panic to excitement. This was a peer based learning course (Myself and the majority of the class did not know this and several people went on their computers and changed courses), for those of you who do not know peer based learning involves students basically teaching themselves the material and then teaching their peers their findings. This was the best course I have yet to take, I learned not only a lot about international economics but how to better my ability at teaching myself what I need to know. In this course we were given three problems throughout the term that we were to be solved in groups, the problems themselves were very vague and indirect yet through researching and presenting our findings in small groups and then in individually completed essays we became knowledgeable in international economics. A bit more on topic was the fact that our essays were to be written individually (and submitted through turnitin) yet all of our research was done in a group setting. This furthered my ability to take information from various sources (mainly the internet) and formulate my own opinion and use proper citation where needed. For me this style of learning was very awkward at first but the reward for sticking with it was great.

Another course I took that term was statistics for economics, for some of the assignments the data used for the questions were chosen by the students themselves (limited to a specific time frame to prevent plagiarism). In the end I think the professor and TAs only checked our formulas rather than our answers because of the time it would have taken to find the correct solution for each problem but this is an interesting way to combat plagiarism.