VIDEOS FOR PRACTICING ECONOMETRICS

Econometrics is an essential course and with great applications in the professional career of an economist or a business manager. However, due to its strong theoretical component this subject used to be taught by a traditional education methodology focus on the learner. For this, the students often lose the vision of its possible uses and they only memorize theoritical knowledge to forget quickly.

One of the action lines of the High Education Area (HEA) is the Student Centred Learning (SCL) which was fully taken into the process during the Leuven/Louvain-la-Neuve ministerial conference, in 2009. This objective implies the adaptation of the course contents and the need of an interactive learning process.

These two implications drove us to design multimedia educational materials that encourage self-learning. Based on the idea of Professor Hugo Maul (http://tinyurl.com/6d2yysy), who has developed a series of videos on econometrics, we have extended the series with the development of video-resolution exercises using free software Econometrics Gretl.

Gretl is a free and open-source software for econometric analysis increasingly used at universities across the world. The mean advantages of the software are its intuitive platform and that it can be modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

With these videos we provide to our students the possibility to use specific econometric software to develop different empirical applications with real data. Every student could watch the video every time they wanted and wherever they were. They are not limited to the three-four hour by week that the professor has to explain the subject. The videos have subtitles and audio to allow accessibility to all the public and they are available to the university community through a website.