This page collects the teaching tools and approaches I have developed for my economics courses. They include interactive simulations, AI course assistants, the MicroCheck project and a high-stakes writing assignment. Several of them are free for anyone to use.
Interactive Simulations
I build interactive simulations for my economics courses with generative AI tools. In each one, students make a prediction or a decision first and then see what happens. The simulations run in the browser, and nothing students do is saved or sent anywhere.
Principles of Microeconomics
Shawarma Market Shifts
Something happens in the market for shawarma near the university. Say which curve moves and what happens to the price and the quantity, then watch it on the graph.
International Finance and Policy
The Arbitrage Desk
You are a trader at a bank in Dubai with 1,000,000 dirhams. In each round, decide if there is a riskless profit, then trade and see what you end with.
International Finance and Policy
Money and the Dollar
A central bank makes a decision about money. Predict what happens to prices and to the exchange rate, then watch ten years play out.
International Finance and Policy
The Overshooting Dollar
The Fed raises the money supply by 10 percent. Follow the dollar on the day of the news and in the long run.
AI in Teaching and Learning
I am the principal investigator of MicroCheck, an AI-powered system that detects student misconceptions during formative assessment. It is funded by a UAEU Innovations in Teaching and Learning grant (2026).
In Spring 2026, I built AI course assistants for two of my courses, Intermediate Macroeconomics and International Trade. As a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), I have also run workshops for faculty on designing such assistants and on creating rubrics with ChatGPT. The slides and worksheets are free to download from my post Building an AI Course Assistant.
Assessment Design
Many final-year students skip the readings and rely on the lecture slides. To change this, I designed a high-stakes writing assignment for a final-year economics course. I describe how it worked, what students said about it and what I would do differently in an article in Assessment Update and in a blog post.
Khalid, U. (2025). Encouraging self-study outside class by incorporating high-stakes writing. Assessment Update, 37(2), 6-15. https://doi.org/10.1002/au.30435
If your department would like to run one of these workshops, I would be happy to hear from you at usman.khalid@uaeu.ac.ae.
