The Challenges and Advantage of Being Among the First<\/strong>
\r\nHS2921 is one of a few university courses in the world devoted to Effective Altruism and while that speaks well for its future popularity among students it also brought on unique challenges towards its launch.\r\nDr Mattsson explains. \"Although Effective Altruism is growing as a social movement, there aren't many university courses on the topic and there are no textbooks. We are happy to teach the first university course on Effective Altruism, that we are aware of, in Asia, but it meant we had to create a lot of the materials ourselves,\" he says. This was challenging as some of the topics, like existential risks, are quite far away from our own research and teaching focus. Fortunately, there are lots of great materials like books, blogposts, and podcasts, created by people both inside and outside the effective altruism movement and we drew on these materials to create our course.<\/p>\r\n
Dr Chow indicates another issue they had to contend with in the development of their course. \"It is also always challenging to teach students from very diverse academic backgrounds and with very different interests, most of whom have no background in neither Philosophy nor Economics,\" he says. \"We have tried to design the course so that students can follow their own interests and leveraging their own strengths by doing group projects and writing essays on topics of their choice. We hope that for some of the students these projects will be the first step towards a deeper engagement with these topics.\"<\/p>\r\n
All their challenges aside, Dr Mattsson and Dr Chow have seen enrolment to their course this semester exceed their initial expectations and are encouraged to consider hosting a larger class in future. \"This is the first year that we are teaching the course, so we really didn't know what to expect in terms of student interest. We had set a cap of 100 students and gotten a lecture theatre with capacity for that enrollment,\" says Dr Mattson. \"We thought that this would be more than enough, but we were pleasantly surprised that more than 150 students tried to enroll in the course!\"<\/p>\r\n
\"Yes, unfortunately we had to say no to some students due to space constraints,\" says Dr Chow. \"But we intend to increase the number of students we can accommodate in future years and hopefully the interest among students will continue to be strong.\"<\/p>\r\n
\r\n<\/em>For more information on HS2921 go to Canvas<\/a> (for NUS Students) or NUSMods<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div><\/div>