As budget pressures and interests in more effective teaching techniques increase, faculty and administrators have begun to look online to find alternatives to the current standards.

A new alternative is Aplia, an online teaching tool used specifically for economics. The site is unaffiliated with the university and is based on subscription rates.

The program is primarily for students in introductory economics courses. Microeconomics students will pay $60, and macroeconomics students will pay $20 for Aplia, an online supplement to economics textbooks.

“About a year and a half ago, a couple faculty members became aware of Aplia and used it,” said Arne Hallam, chairman of the economics department. “Two or three more people used it last fall, and now we’re using it with all the classes this semester. There were some things we liked.”

Matthew Doyle, assistant professor of economics, said that Aplia is specifically useful for economics.

“It’s integrated with the textbook and gives instant feedback,” he said. “Running Aplia is easier for me. I haven’t had any problems with things crashing or entering in stuff.”

Hallam said experiments illustrating economics principles, which were only done in an honors section of microeconomics, are now feasible in classes with more than 100 students.

“Aplia provides some standardization for the 2,500 ISU students that take these introductory economics courses each semester,” he said, “And we have the chance to have problem sets and quizzes drawn from the same set of questions.”

Hallam said he hopes doing similar problems will benefit students when studying the material together and teaching assistants helping people from other sections.

As one of the first programs used for online learning at Iowa State, WebCT has been used for everything from posting a syllabus online to running a course completely online.

“All three of the Regents schools, the Iowa Department of Education and most of the community colleges use WebCT,” said Allan Schmidt, assistant director at Iowa State’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. “We’re still realizing its potential.”

Schmidt said the main advantage in the WebCT system is its ability to integrate with other systems at Iowa State, like the grading functions on AccessPlus. WebCT is the most common online learning tool at Iowa State. More than 30,500 different students, faculty and staff logged onto 2,063 courses on WebCT last fall.

The university pays $43,000 for a WebCT site license, but the figures for the salaries of the support staff or the cost of the equipment were not available, Schmidt said.

An unexplored issue about Aplia is student privacy.

Students’ grades are covered under the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, which controls a college’s release of student educational records, like their exams and grades.

Keith Bystrom, associate university counsel, said that the issue of student privacy on an off-site operation like Aplia was raised by the Registrar’s Office but declined to comment further on the issue.