Open educational resources for economics
A brief portrait of the CORE Econ education portal
What is CORE Econ?
CORE Econ (Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics) offers free, open educational resources aimed at students and teachers to provide a deep understanding of economics. The aim of CORE – a charity registered in England and Wales – is to empower a new generation of citizens to understand and discuss societal issues such as climate change, social injustice and the future of work.
How does CORE Econ work?
CORE Econ offers a wide range of online resources developed by an international team of economists. These resources include:
- E-books: CORE Econ offers textbooks such as “The Economy 2.0: Microeconomics”, “The Economy 2.0: Macroeconomics” or “Experiencing Economics”, a free e-book containing economic experiments and games for teaching. These materials are available in eight languages, including German, and enable students to experience economic concepts interactively.
- CORE Insights: Additional teaching and learning resources created by leading economists such as Claudia Buch, Vice President of the Deutsche Bundesbank. These resources link theoretical concepts with real-world issues.
- Interactive visualisations: Tools for visualising topics such as inflation, global income and wealth distribution and the spread of COVID-19.
- Free online courses: CORE Econ offers online courses on current topics such as climate change (“Doing Economics: Measuring climate change”) or economic inequality (“Measuring economic inequality in today’s world”), which are available on platforms such as Coursera and FutureLearn.
Who is CORE Econ suitable for?
CORE Econ is aimed at teachers, students and researchers. The platform offers quizzes, definition tests (also suitable for self-testing), video tutorials and exercises to deepen and test understanding.
Who is behind CORE Econ?
CORE Econ is led by an editorial team that includes renowned economists such as Professor Wendy Carlin, Vice President of the International Economic Association (IEA), Sam S. Bowles, Professor at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), Professor Margaret Stevens and Professor Eileen Tipoe from the University of Oxford. The project is supported by over 30 lead authors and hundreds of contributors from various fields of economics.
What is the mission of CORE Econ?
CORE Econ pursues the vision that a radically changed economic education can contribute to a fairer, more sustainable and more democratic world. In order to realise this vision, CORE Econ focuses education on the most pressing social problems, places the student at the centre of teaching and ensures that knowledge is freely accessible worldwide. CORE Econ also strives to promote diversity in economic education through new content and methods and to include more women and underrepresented groups.
Further information:
You can find out more about CORE Econ and the available resources on the official website: https://www.core-econ.org.
*The text was written on 3 September 2024.