Suggest material
We aggregate material from the world wide web and make it freely accessible for students, teachers, and the interested public. Our vision is to create a unique hub for learning and teaching material that connects their producers and users across the globe. For this vision to become true, we need your help!
What Type of material are we looking for?
If you find material or courses that should be added to the Exploring Economics Media Library, you can suggest this material via our online form. Your suggested material can be linked to your name on the website when the material is published. A final approval and review of the material is done by our content management team.
We welcome multiple formats of learning-material
Exploring Economics is a platform that collects and promotes various types and formats of freely available e-learning content for both (self-)learners as well as educators/multipliers. We do currently collect the following types of material.
We currently do not accept...
- Any content that is not freely available on the internet. We only connect (or embed) publicly available material (via URL-link) to our platform. This also means that we do not include (for-sale) journal articles and newspaper articles.
- Term papers, theses and working papers, which have not been published somewhere else
- Typical working papers that do not have an introductory or review character and rather deal with current research and specialized scientific discourses and therefore cannot be used as learning material
- Material that fails to meet the criteria for relevance and quality
Which criteria must new content fulfil?
Relevance
The main criterion for relevance is if the material you suggest provides economic knowledge. Certainly, the material can approach an economic issue or school of thought from a political, sociological, psychological, technical, etc. point of view. Nevertheless, the core aspect of the material has to be a theory, method or topic that is related to (existing or possible) economic phenomena, problems, practices, structures, and systems. Having said this, don’t worry too much about this criterion. As issues such as climate change illustrate, most issues or problems have an economic dimension, the line between economic and non-economic content is not very clear-cut and there is a review process after all.
Beyond selecting ‘economic’ content, considering the following questions can help you when gauging the relevance of a content:
Does the content you suggest speak to important societal topics or problems? Is it a relevant contribution to an ongoing debate in economics? Does it provide a perspective that is marginal or even missing from mainstream-discourse? Is the content of sufficient generality to be useful for non-specialist audiences?
Whatever the reasons for picking a content, it is generally useful to elaborate upon why you chose to suggest it in the editor’s comment.
Quality
Is the material produced in an adequately professional way and does it meet certain scientific standards? In the case of academic blog articles or video-lectures, the argumentation should be clear and comprehensible and follow a scientific rather than an opinion-led character. Of course the differentiation between both can be difficult since value-free science cannot exist. Nevertheless, (political) statements should be backed by arguments and empirical remarks.
Please be cautious with certain institutes that are politically biased or promote a specific agenda; make the respective background of the material transparent in the comment section of the online material suggestion form.
Take into account not only scientific but also technical quality criteria. Does the audio-podcast or the video, for instance, have good audio quality? Is the text well-written and structured and error-free? Are graphics correctly labeled and are the data sources indicated?
Despite its open stance, pluralism does not mean anything goes. We therefore reserve our right to reject content suggestions, which are not in accordance with our values, e.g. content that includes racism, sexism or antisemitism.
Perspective
We want to overcome the Global North-bias of Exploring Economics. This means that perspectives and topics that focus on the Global South or countries/issues in the Global South are of special interest.
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