Jorge Kawas is the Academic Head of Finance and Business at Unitec, the largest private university in Honduras. After running a small classroom pilot of CORE’s The Economy alongside the traditional textbook at Unitec, Jorge travelled to the UK to attend our 2026 CORE workshop at Loughborough University. We caught up with him afterwards to hear what’s prompted Unitec to rethink how it teaches economics, what the pilot found, and what comes next.
Hi Jorge, thanks for joining us. Could you start by telling us a bit about yourself and your role at Unitec?
I’m the Academic Head of Finance and Business at Unitec. I oversee four undergraduate programmes. Three are in business administration, each with a different orientation (business intelligence, operations, and entrepreneurship), and one in finance and economics. We don’t have a programme at Unitec dedicated exclusively to economics, but our sister institution, Ceutec, does. My own background is in finance. I have a Master’s in Big Data and a Bachelor’s in Finance, with around six or seven years of experience in the banking industry. Alongside Unitec I do a little research and consulting.
What’s driving your interest in changing how economics is taught at Unitec?
Our goal is to be global, not just Honduran, or Central American. The way the university teaches is changing across the board. We call this our “curricular ecosystem”. AI has changed the rules of the game. Students can ask ChatGPT to explain almost anything, so a lecturer who just reads from PowerPoint slides isn’t really offering them much. We need to redesign how we teach.
In economics, that pressure is even sharper. A lot of what introductory students are given is theory they will never apply, drawn from textbooks that are essentially classics of the 19th century. Students memorise enough to pass the exam, and then it’s gone. And sometimes, when a student asks something interesting in class, the honest answer is that the theory doesn’t really account for it. That’s a hard situation for a teacher to be in. The problem isn’t unique to economics, but it is particularly visible there.
On traditional textbooks: “Students sometimes feel like they’re the problem… when really the issue is the way the material is being presented.”
How did you hear about CORE?
Through Ian Walker, a British economist who has been working in Honduras with SENDAS, an independent think tank focused on Honduras’s economic challenges. Ian had a conversation with our CEO, and mentioned the CORE workshop in the UK. Around the same time, our CEO had already encouraged the academic heads at Unitec to look at CORE because it is open access and free.
Reading the materials, I thought CORE looked very aligned with the “curricular ecosystem” we are trying to build at Unitec: driven by questions, grounded in data, more interactive. The workshop seemed like the right place to find out whether it was a good fit, and to get my own questions answered.
Before the workshop, you had already started experimenting with CORE in the classroom. Tell us about that.
One of our professors was teaching two sections of an introductory microeconomics course: same class, same materials, two groups of students. These were second-year students from programmes like business administration, marketing, and international relations. Courses where economics isn’t the main focus, so they often find these modules among the hardest they take. I’d been told we needed to commit to one approach or the other, but I asked the professor whether we could try one section taught with CORE, and the other with a traditional textbook. He agreed. Each section had around 20 to 30 students. It ran over a 10-week trimester, in Spanish, using the Spanish edition of CORE’s The Economy.
I should add, this wasn’t a formal experiment. I wish I’d put more measurement instruments in place from the start. What we did do was run a survey at the end and looked at the grades.
What did you find?
The traditional class found the material complicated, and most of them came out with worse grades than the CORE group. They told us they had memorised what they needed to memorise, but they couldn’t see when in their lives they were ever going to use it.
The CORE group was different. The thing that stood out for me was that they said they had understood something complicated in an easier way. That matters more than it sounds. Students sometimes feel like they’re the problem, they think they’re not clever enough to follow what’s going on. But really, the issue is the way the material is presented. The CORE group didn’t have that feeling. They were more confident about the subject. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting the difference to be that pronounced. The professor who taught both groups now uses CORE for all his sections.
It’s an encouraging outcome, and one that we’ve seen with other similar studies in Uruguay and Australia. Nevertheless, the idea of changing course textbooks often faces resistance due to effort involved with redesigning courses and scepticism about learning outcomes. Did you experience any resistance?
This is where I expect the biggest work to be done. Some of our professors have been teaching the same course in the same way for 20 or 30 years, with the same textbook, just a new edition each year. Switching is genuinely hard. One professor described it nicely to me: when you teach in the traditional way, you start with the concepts and build up, like building a house: first the foundations, then the walls, then the roof. He said CORE starts with the roof, then checks which walls are needed, and only puts the floor in last. It’s a different sequence, and not everyone will be comfortable with it. We’ll need workshops, training and time. I went to the CORE workshop to understand the methodology myself, but I’m not the one teaching economics every week. Our professors will need to feel supported through the change.
We were delighted to welcome people such as yourself from all over the world at the recent CORE workshop in Loughborough. As a programme overseer, what did you take away from the workshop?
I went in still unsure. On the first day I was processing it, working out whether this would be the right fit for our programmes. What changed my mind, on the second day, were the experiments. Seeing Humberto Llavador demonstrate the ultimatum experiment in a classroom setting, and the breadth of interactive resources CORE has built around the textbook. We already run experiments of that kind in our own classes, with pens and paper, and I could see immediately how much more we could do with CORE’s resources. That was the point where I thought: yes, this is what I want for my programmes.
I understand you’re now also using one of CORE’s other resources, Doing Economics, in your econometrics teaching.
Yes. My colleague is currently using Doing Economics in four econometrics classes. It isn’t formally listed as the primary bibliography for those courses, that’s a separate process, but we’re using it. We want to keep gathering evidence: student feedback, exam outcomes, all of it.
A topic we often discuss with new members of the CORE institutional community is how important the local-language edition is. How does that play out at Unitec, where you have a strong English-language teaching programme?
It’s both important and not important, and it’s worth explaining why.
At Unitec, around 80% of our students come in already proficient in English. They take the TOEIC English proficiency exam (Test of English for International Communication), and we have an English-as-Medium-of-Instruction (EMI) programme where classes are taught entirely in English. So, in terms of student comprehension, English-language CORE materials would not be a barrier for most of our students.
The reason the Spanish edition matters to us is administrative. The academic authority in Honduras reviews our programmes on a regular cycle, and the primary textbook listed on the syllabus has to be in Spanish. The fact that CORE’s The Economy is available in Spanish is what allows us to list it as our main course text.
Jorge, thank you so much. We’re really glad you came to the workshop, and we’re looking forward to seeing how things develop at Unitec.
For more on the 2026 CORE workshop Jorge attended at Loughborough, see our workshop recap.
Find out more about Unitec at https://www.unitec.edu/ and about its sister institution Ceutec at https://ceutec.hn/.
To learn more about Ian Walker’s work in Honduras, visit https://www.sendas.org/en/.
The Spanish edition of CORE’s The Economy is available free online.
