2019 Program Chair for the 12^th Annual Conference on Teaching and Research in Economic Education (CTREE), member of Program Committee 2018
The conference is sponsored by the American Economic Association, which is the premier national organization of professional economists.

2019 - Present UConn Husky Career Champion
The UConn Career Development Office recognizes faculty who are actively engaged in assisting students in determining and reaching their career goals. University recognition

2018 Begin 3-year term as member of  American Economic Association Committee on Economic Education
This is a standing committee of the premier national organization of professional economists. The mission of the Committee is to improve the quality of economics education at all levels: pre-college, college, adult, and general education.

2015  Served as co-chair of the Economics Department project to develop online team-taught courses in Econ 1201 and Econ 1202
Department level recognition

2015  UConn Service Learning Fellow
Co-organized Service Learning Fair, Concourse, Stamford Campus May 2015

2014  Selected by the Center for Teaching & Learning for submission Exemplary Economics Course Design
University level recognition

2013  BlackBoard Exemplary Course Design Honorable Mention for Online Econ 1201
A national competition evaluating online course for best practices in course design

2012  Grillo Outstanding Teacher Award in UConn Economics Department
Recognition as a department leader in using technology in the classroom

2022 Career Excellence Teaching Award, The AAUP-UConn Chapter

2021 University Teaching Fellow, The UConn Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL)

2011 Featured on the homepage of the UConn Website Dec 17, 2011
The feature linked to an article in UConn Today (Nov 11, 2011) describing Mobile Phone instructional innovations I developed.

2003   Center for Teaching & Learning Online Course Development Award
Selected as one of five in a university level pilot project to develop the first online courses at UConn

2000  University of Connecticut Chancellor's Information Technology Award
University level recognition as a leader in using technology in instruction

2000-02  UConn Teaching and Learning Institute,  $26,000
With S.Cudiner (UConn Stamford Librarian), developed inter-disciplinary cyber-course content at the UConn-Stamford Campus Led 4 faculty workshops (1 each semester for 2 years) in for online course design in WebCT (the UConn LMS at the time). Grant provided funding for equipment and 2 work-study students to for a drop-in room for assisting faculty in using

1998  Neato.com CD Design Award
Commercial company award for design of cover for CD for digital distribution of course content for Econ 1201

2011 -12 UConn Mobil Steering Committee member, Appointed by President Herbst, developed the ‘myUConn’ Mobile App

2010-11 UConn eCampus Steering Committee member, Appointed by Associate Provost Sally Reis

2010-p UConn Software Licensing Group, member

2005 University Senate Subcommittee on Online Course Development

MSQE Student Tracking Pandemic featured in UConn Today April 1, 2020
“Using the skills he was learning in Prof. Oskar Harmon’s Writing and Communication for Economics and Business graduate course, Jiang began assembling the COVID-19 Connecticut Data Visualization website, where he daily charts the pandemic’s course both here in Connecticut and across the country.”

At the outset of the COVID Pandemic I assigned students in my course Econ 5501 Writing and Communication Skills for Economics and Business to visualize the spread of COVID using the software Tableau.  Jiang produced the best website and I worked with the staff of UConn Today to write a feature article on the project.  The lesson plans I used to teach Tableau were subsequently published here: Harmon, Oskar, Steve Batt, Paul Tomolonis, 2020 “Learning Tableau: A Data Visualization Tool” Journal of Economic Education, 51,3-4, 317-328.

National Association of Business Economists (NABE) Certification 2018 of UConn Master of Science in Quantitative Economics (MSQE) Program
NABE is a national organization of business economists. For qualifying Masters level programs if offers the designation as a Certified Business Economics Program, which qualifies the program graduates as pre-CBE certified, and as CBE certified conditional on a NABE test and 2 years job experience post-graduation.  I initiated the application and followed through to certification of the MSQE program.  This certification of MSQE graduates gives our graduates an additional professional credential for their resume and a listing in the NABE employer job availability binders, which enhances the employment prospects of our graduates.   See websiteon Na, UConn is listed on the right column in the middle)

Job placement counselor for students in the Economics Department’s Master of Science in Quantitative Economics (MSQE)2017-present
The MSQE program enrolled its first class of 14 in Fall 2017, its second class of 23 in Fall 2018, and the current class of 14 in Fall 2019. Each semester I work with students on their resumes and interview skills for placement in summer internships and in permanent jobs.  I assist students in using Husky-Handshake to research companies that are attending the Fall and Spring semester Career Fairs sponsored by the Office of Career Development, and arrange for speakers (alumni and corporate recruiters) to meet with our students at department workshops.

Advisor to the UConn Stamford Fed Challenge Team 2015 to 2019
The Fed Challenge is a national competition sponsored by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. There are five participating member banks that host a regional competition, and the regional winners go to Washington DC for the final round.  In 2015  I founded a team for UConn Stamford to participate in the New York Federal Reserve Bank regional competition.  Each year approximately 10 students participate.  We have made four consecutive appearances: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019.  Our second appearance in 2018 we had our best success by advancing to the semi-final round.: 8 of 32 teams made it to the semi-final round.

Advisor to the UConn Stamford Student Economics Club 2010 – 2019
The club sponsors speakers and an annual alumni networking event

Taught an undergraduate Independent Study course in economic research in Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2018, and Fall 2019
The course enrollment varies between 3 to 8. Each student works on a data collection project where they collect data from original sources, clean the data using Excel, and write a statistical analysis of the data using the program Stata, which is a statistical package commonly used by research economists

UConn Screening of the film “And Then They Came for Us”, Spring 2018
Remembrance Day is observed on or near February 19. The day President Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 interning all Japanese Americans.  Working with the Dodd Institute, I arranged for this award winning documentary about the US internment of Japanese families during WWII to be screened at UConn Hartford and UConn Stamford and for the producer Abby Ginzberg to speak at each campus  during the week of Remembrance Day 2018.

UConn Metanoia November 8 2017
Co-organized with and participated as a speaker member for the panel “Taking a Knee, Raising a Fist: Race, Sport, and Politics in Historical Perspective”, with Professors Joseph Cooper, sport management, and Jeffrey Ogbar, history.

UConn Screening of the film “Agents of Change”, February 2017
Black History month.  I arranged for this award winning documentary about the controversy surrounding the creating Black History Departments at Cornell and UC Berkley in 1969 to be screened at UConn Storrs and UConn Stamford and for the producer Abby Ginzberg, and Ibram X. Kendi (National Book Award winner) to speak at each campus  during Black History month 2017.

UConn Alumni Networking Event, Annually since Spring 2016
Co-organize with the UConn Foundation an annual event networking UConn Alumni with economics majors about to enter the job market

UConn Screening of the film “Business of Amateurs”, February 2016
I arranged for this award winning documentary about the issue of the NCAA prohibition of paying student-athletes and the controversy surrounding the Ed O’Bannon lawsuit.  Screened at the Stamford Campus.  Screened at the Storrs campus and followed by a panel discussion with colleagues from Sport Management (Dr. Laura Burton, Dr. Joseph Cooper), and Economics (Dr. Kathleen Segerson).

Student Survey of Transportation Access to UCONN Stamford Campus, Fall 2015
As a class project, organized a survey (with IRB approval as a student research methods project) of transportation access to the Stamford Campus, taught the students how to visualize the data in Tableau, and assisted the students in publishing the visualization to the UConn Library published the results to the UConn Library Outside the Neatline Blog

Harmon, Oskar, Craig Calvert, Matthew Mocarsky, Adam Patterson, Jun Cho “Using Fantasy Baseball Simulation to Teach Economic Concepts” working paper, presented at the Southern Economic Association Annual Meeting November 2020,
A goal of the undergraduate economics programs is teaching data literacy.  The article describes a classroom activity using ESPN Fantasy Baseball Sport where students draft players, a season is simulated.  We use the activity of participating in the baseball league as a motivator to enhance learning of economic concepts of marginal product and competitive balance, and to enhance data literacy skills of locating relevant data, and working with data using Excel spreadsheets.  To prepare for drafting players students complete an exercise using the concept of marginal product to evaluate players and collecting data to compare predicted win contribution of players they are considering for drafting.  After the players are drafted and teams organized into leagues the ESPN program is used to simulate a season.  The results are collected in a data file and students compute measures of competitive balance for each league.  Finally using the same data, with the addition of the method of player valuation used in drafting, students use regression analysis to compare casual relation of player valuation method and team performance.

Harmon, Oskar, Steve Batt, Paul Tomolonis, 2020 “Learning Tableau: A Data Visualization Tool” Journal of Economic Education, 51,3-4, 317-328.
This article describes a tutorial for learning to use Tableau Public, which is free, powerful, and widely used software for data visualization. Data literacy is an important component of  undergraduate research projects and career preparation with the burgeoning use of data analytics.  This paper introduces an exercise that teaches the fundamental Tableau concepts and commands needed to create charts and graphs, assemble them in a dashboard, and tell a story of patterns observed in the data.  Because Tableau is widely used in the field of data analytics it is a valuable research skill for undergraduates to gain experience with.

Harmon, Oskar, Paul Tomolonis, 2020 “Live or WebCam Proctor: Are Outcomes Different? International Review of Economic Education, under review.
Webcam proctoring is becoming the go to solution for exam proctoring. Like online courses it is a convenient technology solution to the anywhere anytime demand for an instructional service.  This study uses data from principles of microeconomics economics course taught in online format to examine whether proctor format makes a difference. The findings of the research suggest that, after controlling for academic and human capital differences,  the average student selecting the Webcam proctoring format scores are no different than students selecting the traditional proctor format.  These results suggest that instructors new to remote teaching should not have concerns that online proctors are less able than in-person proctors to detect/deter academic dishonesty during exams.

Harmon, Oskar R. and Paul Tomonolis  2019. "Social Media as an Online Course Discussion Forum – Engagement and Results of a Randomized Trial” International Review of Economic Education, 30, January, Article 100157

This paper makes a comparison between using social media or traditional Course Management System (CMS) discussion groups in a fully online Principles of Microeconomics course. Students were randomly assigned to a discussion forum in either Facebook or CMS to discern a difference in the level of engagement and learning outcomes. The popular hypothesis is that students using social media have greater engagement with the class and higher learning outcomes relative to students using a CMS platform. Reasons for the positive effect include the ease of use and student familiarity with social media, which allows them to make more connections and gain a deeper understanding of the course material through discussions with others. Contrary to the widely held view, the results of this study suggest that participation in the treatment Facebook group is associated with declining student engagement and a reduction in the semester course average of 3 to 5 points on a 100-point scale.  An implication for online course design is that discussion forums within the learning management syster are likely more effective than hosting the discussion on a popular social media platform such as Facebook.

Harmon, Oskar, and Jun Cho, 2019,  “Two excel based exercises for a Sports Economics Class”, abstract submitted to The North American Society for Sport Management Teaching and Learning Fair, 2020

These exercises use the excel spreadsheet for graphical and numeric exercises.  The exercises  can flexibly be used as homework or as in-class activities for collaboratively work as in pair-share.  One exercise is on the topic of paying college athletes, the other on measure of competitive balance.  The first exercise presents the student with an excel worksheet that has the supply/demand graph with pre-drawn objects  representing the economic effects of the “cost of attendance”.  We find the use of a visual graph they can manipulate reinforces their understanding of economic principles and encourages lively debate (e.g. does change in amateur status effect the demand curve?).  The second exercise instructed how to download from an online data source won-lost record.  They are asked to find and download this data for the conference of their favorite D1 Power Five college football team competes in.  Then they are asked to compare the competitive balance, along the calculated measures, between the MLB American League, and the conference of their favorite team, and to speculate on the reasons for observed differences in competitive balance.  We find the exercise reinforces their understanding of the math of competitive balance measures, their understanding of the rules adopted for competitive balance, and teaches them skills in downloading data from original sources.

Harmon, Oskar R, Robert Szarks  2018. "Use Google Drawings to Create Homework Exercises and Essays with Graphs”, Journal of Economics & Teaching, 2(2), 68-78.
We show how Google Drive’s Drawings tool can be used to create homework exercises suitable for both online and face-to-face classes. This approach allows students to create graphs actively “from scratch,” similar to the traditional pencil-and-paper approach, with a minimal investment of time and money.  This could be a useful active-learning tool for online, blended, and traditional courses.  These exercises are introduced as a complement to problem sets provided by publishers of introductory and advanced level textbooks. The tool allows the instructor to introduce exercises reflecting their customized approach and interest in economic topics. The tool’s learning curve might be described as a bunny slope for users comfortable with the Google suite of tools and as an intermediate-level slope for those just becoming comfortable with their institution’s LMS or with a textbook publisher’s LMS.

Harmon, Oskar, William Alpert, Kenneth A. Couch, 2016. “A Randomized Assessment of Online Learning”. American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, 106(5), 378-382.
This paper contains estimates of the impact of different instructional models that incorporate online course content on learning outcomes of college students of principles of microeconomics using a randomized study design. In the existing literature, there are only three published studies that use a random design to explore the impact of online education in a college-length course on learning outcomes. Thus, this study provides an important extension to a literature that is extraordinarily small given the widespread adoption of online teaching and its potential impact on student outcomes at the postsecondary level.  Our findings are that learning outcomes on exam scores are not meaningfully different for the average student in the control group (classroom instruction) and blended treatment group for any of the estimates presented, however, exam scores are consistently worse for the online treatment group. These results suggest a potentially promising avenue for economizing on teaching resources while maintaining student outcomes is to use blended teaching models of instruction for economics principles that reduce instructor contact time in a classroom setting.

Harmon, Oskar R. , William Alpert, Archita Banik, and James Lambrinos, 2015,  "Class Skipping And Distributing the Instructor’s Lecture Notes" Atlantic Economic Journal, 43:349–361.
At many universities undergraduate introductory economics courses are taught in large lecture halls. Casual empiricism suggests that rates of student absenteeism are significantly greater in the large lecture format compared to the smaller classroom format.  Also there is the compounding factor is that numerous empirical studies have established a statistically significant negative relation between absenteeism and student performance. Using a panel data over several semesters, it is estimated that the average student with less than perfect attendance is better off attending the lecture, but studying from instructor provided lecture notes can significantly reduce the negative effect of absence on exam performance.  Additional estimates of the differential effects of intellectual styles show the notes were the least beneficial for the auditory intellectual style.

Harmon, Oskar R. William T. Alpert, and James Lambrinos. 2014, “Testing the Effect of Hybrid Lecture on Learning Outcomes”, Journal of Online Teaching and Learning, 10(1), 112-129.
Empirical studies have yielded mixed results with regard to the issue of whether the online and traditional modalities have equivalent effects on learning outcomes for courses taught at the Master of Business Administration (MBA) level. A majority of these empirical studies support the conclusion of no significant difference between the modalities. However, only a small percentage of these studies address the issue of self-selection bias, and fewer study the hybrid format. This paper reports on a study that contributes to the existing MBA literature by employing a research design that appropriately handles self-selection bias in the context of a hybrid course. The key finding of the study is that the effect of the online format on learning outcomes does not handicap outcomes relative to the traditional format.

Harmon, Oskar R. William T. Alpert, and Joseph Histen. 2014, “Online Discussion and Learning Outcomes”,  International Advances in Economic Research, 20(1), 33-44
This paper describes how we used Facebook as a discussion tool in the instruction of a principles level economics course and reports empirical estimates of the effect of that use on learning outcomes. Social media as a tool for promoting classroom discussion has advantages and disadvantages. For example, its omnipresence and flat learning curve can promote academic discourse. However social media can promote nonacademic “chatting”, and its omnipresence means the user needs more than a passing knowledge of the privacy settings to have control of their “digital identity”.  Our findings are suggestive of both the promise and peril of using social media in the academic classroom. The sample size of this study is relatively small and further research with larger samples in several courses is needed to determine if these findings will hold up.

Harmon, Oskar R. and James Lambrinos. 2012. "Active Learning Exercises for Principles of Economics Courses." Journal of Economic Education, 43(2).
This article describes using an online drawing program and bulletin board to create active-learning activities for a class on principles of 10 economics. In the activity, the student downloads an initial diagram that sets up a textbook scenario on principles of economics. To finish the activity, the student uses a free online image editing program to diagram the outcome predicted by economic reasoning and then posts it to a free online bulletin board. The approach of digital drawing and posting is a teaching innovation we have not seen described elsewhere. The Web site presents examples of this activity and a 15 quick-start guide for using SumoPaint.com and WikiSpaces.com.  This article used draw tools predating Google Draw.

Harmon, Oskar R.,  Betsy Gulag, Daniel Mercier, Craig. Burdick, and Margaret Brown. 2012. “Graph Tool”, Journal of Economic Education, 43(1)
Economists are known for explaining ideas in graphs. Classroom instructors moving their dia-grams from the white board to the computer screen are often daunted by the labor-intensive and/or programming demands of existing graphing tools. With the submitted tool, instructors can draw diagrams quickly and easily because it is simple to use and because lines and curves are predrawn for applications in economics. The tool has two grids and several objects representing supply and demand curves, indifference curves, cost curves, and production possibilities curves. To create a diagram, the user clicks an object, drags it to the grid, and then unclicks to drop the object. The side-by-side grids are useful, for example, to explain the interaction of firm profits and market prices or to contrast price floors and price ceilings. The aforementioned Web site demonstrates uses of the graph tool in three examples. The first example demonstrates using the graphing tool to draw the standard two-graph representation of a perfectly competitive firm in short-run equilibrium.... The second example presents the same explanation, but does it dynamically in a narrated video…The example shows the power of the tool for multimedia animation. … The third example is the  narrated video with closed captioning for hearing-impaired users.

Harmon, Oskar R. and Judy Buffolino. 2010.  “Assessment Design and Cheating Risk in Online Instruction.”  Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 13(3).
Many consider online courses to be an inferior alternative to traditional face-to-face (f2f) courses because exam cheating is thought to occur more often in online courses. This study examines how the assessment design in online courses contributes to this perception. Following a literature review, the assessment design in a sample of online courses is analyzed and then the results of a survey of student opinion on assessment design issues are reported. We report the finding that in our sample the online courses a heavy reliance on unproctored multiple choice exams and likely have greater cheating risk than comparable f2f courses. For online courses with multiple choice exams we recommend instructors modify their assessment design to proctor some of the multiple choice exams, and aggressively use strategic question shuffling tactics.

Harmon, Oskar R. and James Lambrinos. 2008.  “Are Online Exams an Invitation to Cheat?” Journal of Economic Education,  39(2): 116-125.
In this study, the authors use data from two online courses in principles of economics to estimate a model that predicts exam scores from independent variables of student characteristics. In one course, the final exam was proctored, and in the other course, the final exam was not proctored. In both courses, the first three exams were un-proctored. If no cheating took place, the authors expected the prediction model to have the same explanatory power for all exams, and, conversely, if cheating occurred in the un-proctored exam, the explanatory power would be lower. Their findings are that both across and within class, variations in the R-squared statistic suggest that cheating was taking place when the exams were not proctored.  This article was the first such study in the economics of education literature and at a time where most online courses used un-proctored summative assessments.

Harmon, Oskar R. and Nancy Gillies. 2004.  “Partnering for a Wireless Classroom.” T.H.E. Journal (Technological Horizons in Education), 31(11)

Harmon, Oskar R. and Shelly Cudiner. 2001. “Comparing the Effectiveness of Different Presentation Formats for Workshops on Introductory Library Skills.” Research Strategies, 18(1): 49-61.
Internet access to library electronic databases significantly increased user demand for library instruction. As the supplier of user education services, there has been rising interest among librarians in the cost and effectiveness of alternative presentation formats. This article describes our experiment to compare the difference in effectiveness between a real-time hands-on lecture/demonstration with a high active learning component, and an eclectic format that combines the traditional ‘‘passive’’ lecture format with an ‘‘active’’ hands-on component. We administer pre-and post-surveys to the different classes and find that the eclectic format is associated with significantly higher student retention of material.

Harmon, Oskar R. and Shelly. Cudiner. 2000.  “An Active Learning Approach to Teaching Effective Online Search Strategies: A Librarian/Faculty Collaboration.” T.H.E. Journal (Technological Horizons in Education), 28(5): 52-7.
This article describes the workshops that resulted from the collaboration of a librarian and an economics faculty member. We explain our method of instruction, and some lessons we have learned about electronic resources and college students[1]. The object of our workshops is to teach students how to locate appropriate academic sources on the Web and in library databases, how to create an effective search strategy, and how to use the retrieval features in InfoTrac.

Harmon, Oskar R. and Shelly Cudiner. 2000. "Teaching Economics Students How to Research in an Electronic Library: An Active Learning Approach,” in B. Dewey (ed.) Library User Education: Powerful Learning, Powerful Partnerships  (Scarecrow Press: 2000).