Recently there have been a spate of sites offering free online courses, primarily from elite universities. Those efforts are to be commended. This, however, is something different.
The aim is at students who are taking microeconomics somewhere but are looking for help online. They are stuck on something. In their searches they may find some useful information, but that still doesn't get them unstuck. So they are looking for additional help with that. That's the focus of this site.
This is also meant as an experiment in student driven content. In that sense it is supposed to be like "office hours" though by the nature of the medium the communication will be asynchronous. That means there will be lags between when students ask their questions and when responses are provided. The asynchronous approach should better let this effort scale. Once a volume of questions and responses have been generated, that archive may become useful to other students who are stuck on the same sort of things.
The intent is to keep this service free to students. If the experiments demonstrates persistent and strong demand, I may then look at some way to generate revenue to rationalize my efforts (either grants or advertising) or to recruit others to provide responses apart from me. But for now this is simply a volunteer effort. If I seem a bit slow in responding, please remember that. My goal is to devote at most a couple of hours a day to the activity. I believe I can persist in that and not burn out. We'll see.
Prof. Arvan
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