Paula Albuquerque and Ana Lúcia Luís both teach economics at ISEG, Universidade de Lisboa. In the 2024–2025 academic year, ISEG’s economics department switched microeconomics teaching from the Krugman and Wells textbook to CORE’s The Economy 2.0. Paula and Ana attended our 2026 CORE Workshop at Loughborough University earlier this year, and we caught up with them afterwards to hear how their first year of teaching with CORE went, what they found challenging, and what they think could be improved.
Hi Paula, hi Ana, thanks for joining us. Could you start by telling us a little about your backgrounds?
Paula: I’m an economist, all of my studies, up to PhD, were in economics. I’ve been teaching microeconomics for many years. Until last year we used the Krugman and Wells textbook. This past year was our first year teaching with CORE.
Ana: I’ve been teaching economics for many years too. At ISEG we used Krugman and Wells, but before that I’d used several other textbooks. Our first contact with CORE was last year, and this is our first year actually teaching it.
What prompted the move from Krugman and Wells to CORE?
Paula: We felt a need for refreshment. What we had worked, but it had been like that for a long time, and economics is dynamic, there are new issues that aren’t really contemplated in the existing programmes. The argument we heard for CORE was that it offers a new way of showing things to students, very much anchored in reality. You start from real-life problems and ask: how can we solve these? Then you introduce the tools. That was a convincing argument for us to move.
We also liked the new topics that we hadn’t covered before; heterogeneity of economic agents, for example. People are different, they have different preferences, and once you introduce those different motivations the results can be completely different. Combining that with game theory was exciting, and it worked very well in class.
Ana: Economics teaching needs to be updated. CORE talks about contemporary issues that more traditional textbooks don’t cover, and keeping students engaged in class is very important. Sometimes they think economics is boring; we need to motivate them.
How widely is CORE being used at ISEG?
Paula: Several courses now use CORE: micro, macro, and we also have a unit that uses Doing Economics. So at least three courses currently use CORE.
What were the challenges of the transition to CORE?
Paula: We were already very familiar with the other textbook, and how the topics within it connected to each other. With CORE, the linkages between the topics were completely different, and we had to spend time understanding why we were doing things this way: why present this topic now, rather than where it used to be?
That familiarisation with the links between topics was the most challenging part for me, not for the students. The students didn’t notice as they had nothing to compare it with.
Ana: I agree, it was more difficult for the teachers than for the students. We’ve worked with one programme for many years, and knew our route through it very well. We had to change our mindset. After that, everything went very well. It was challenging, but it felt like progress.
Instructors all have their own ways of teaching with CORE, sometimes by teaching modules in a different order, for example. Did you adopt all of The Economy 2.0 at once? Were there any units that didn’t quite land?
Paula: We didn’t cover all the units. We taught Units 2, 3, 4, 7, 8 and 10 in full, and parts of Unit 1. Where we did use the units, we followed them closely; we didn’t just use them to complement what we already had.
There are some parts we’ll adapt next time. Micro Unit 2, for example, starts with growth and how it rose more in recent decades than at any other point in history, with the Industrial Revolution as the turning point. It is a nice explanation, but we found our students weren’t so interested in the Industrial Revolution. It’s not really a real-life reference point for them. So we’ll adapt that for next year.
Ana: This was our first semester with CORE, so there’s always room for improvement. Next semester we’ll adjust, adapt, and choose differently.
Some instructors are concerned that transitioning to CORE will be too difficult. The free teaching materials on our website are intended to help. Did you use any of them?
Ana: We used pretty much everything. All of the exercises came from the website. We adapted maybe two or three exercises from previous years, but we tried to focus on new exercises and new materials, at least in practical classes.
Paula: Yes. We have theory classes and practice classes, and we tried to use as much of the CORE material as possible in both.
Do you collect any data on outcomes?
Paula: We saw an increase in the percentage of students who passed. But we can’t be entirely sure that the improvement was due to CORE. It might have been because, unconsciously, we made the exams a little easier. We were worried after a first year of teaching new material that things might not run as smoothly as in previous years. I don’t think we did it on purpose, but I can’t be 100% sure. We need to teach it again and see whether the same thing happens.
We don’t have data on class attendance, but my impression is that more students stayed engaged in class than before.
A recent randomised study in Uruguay found a similar story. Students taught with CORE were significantly more likely to attend classes and to feel the course had contributed to their academic and professional development.
One question that always comes up when we look at pass rates is: do you think AI played any role in the increase?
Paula: No, not really. Our courses are assessed in person and on paper, not online. Even if some students used AI to study, that wouldn’t be enough to change the numbers, we have more than 600 students. Exams are run in the traditional way.
Ana: Yes, exactly, there’s no take-home assessment.
Paula, Ana, thank you so much. We’re glad you came to the workshop and we wish you all the best for the next semester.
For more on the 2026 CORE workshop Paula and Ana attended at Loughborough University, see our workshop recap.
The Portuguese edition of CORE’s The Economy: A Economia.
You can find Ana’s ISEG faculty page here and Paula’s here. For more on ISEG, visit https://www.iseg.ulisboa.pt/.
