Anna Farina Poerbonegoro is a lecturer at Parahyangan Catholic University, Indonesia, and is leading a program to transition the institution’s economics department over to CORE’s texts. As part of the transition, Anna is also leading a project to translate CORE’s The Economy 2.0 into Indonesian.
We’ll talk regularly with Anna over the coming months to illustrate the process of transitioning a department from a traditional economics textbook to CORE. We’ll see first hand how the CORE adoption process works, and get a unique window into the tremendous dedication that goes into a translations of The Economy 2.0.
The following conversation took place in December 2025, while Anna and her department were at the very beginning of the adoption and translation project.
Hi Anna, please tell us a little about your background and how you became interested in CORE.
From 2016 until 2024, I was a graduate student at Colorado State University. Part of my scholarship involved teaching undergraduates. The department adopted CORE in 2018.
I worked extensively with CORE while teaching principle-level microeconomics and macroeconomics. These were large lecture-hall courses, around 180 students per class, because principles is a prerequisite for many other courses. Graduate students were typically assigned two sections, either both micro or both macro.
As part of that assignment, we also participated in a CORE workshop, which at the time was held at Barnard College. There, we learned more about CORE’s pedagogical approach and how it works in practice.
When did the idea to transition the department to CORE first come up?
Last year, I returned to Parahyangan Catholic University in Indonesia. I’ve taught online since 2021 using elements of CORE, but when I came back in person, I started introducing the CORE approach more deliberately. Compared to the textbook we currently use, Mankiw, CORE is newer, more empirical, more hands-on, and students tend to like it.
We’re still using Mankiw for principles, but in 2027 we are scheduled to move to a new curriculum. We revise our curriculum every four to five years. I recommended that we switch entirely to CORE. I championed CORE to my colleagues and sold them on its benefits, like the emphasis on starting from real-world empirical phenomena rather than abstract theory.
What issues do you have with your current texts?
One major issue with Mankiw is that many examples are rooted in Western contexts, which Indonesian students often struggle to relate to. Students frequently tell us that economics feels dry and difficult because they don’t see how the concepts apply to real life.
Even when institutions agree that their current economics textbook isn’t ideal, the effort required to switch to a new textbook is often cited as a barrier to adoption of CORE. What concerns did you run into when proposing the switch to CORE?
The main concern was that CORE might be too difficult for first-year students, introducing game theory, inequality, and imperfect markets to students who are straight out of high school felt like a lot. My response was that it’s the responsibility of faculty to learn new ways of explaining material. We can’t rely solely on textbooks. If we don’t adapt, we won’t be able to respond to changes in the world around us. I shared my teaching materials from Colorado State, slides for both micro and macro, with the department. I use animations to explain concepts such as price-setting and equilibrium adjustments step by step. That helped colleagues see that these ideas can be taught clearly.
We also decided to run a two- or three-day workshop during midterm week to help instructors get comfortable with CORE concepts. Advanced ideas can be introduced early, we just need to present them using accessible language and narrative.
How will the transition process work?
Starting next semester, we’ll begin a three-semester transition period. During this time, we’ll teach CORE and Mankiw side by side, with an increasing emphasis on CORE. This is meant to ease the transition for instructors who are very used to the traditional approach—starting with the “10 principles of economics,” then demand and supply, then perfect competition.
With CORE, we’ve proposed moving those 10 principles to the end of the course, as a recap of what students have learned—starting instead with technology, production, and real-world institutions. My colleagues recognised that CORE is more challenging, as it introduces game theory and imperfect markets early on. But that reflects reality: monopolistic competition is far more common than perfect competition.
What are the biggest challenges you see in making this transition?
Language is a major hurdle. English is not the first language for Indonesian students, and many struggle with English textbooks. As a result, they often stop reading altogether and rely only on lecture slides, which isn’t enough.
Someone asked whether CORE existed in Indonesian. It doesn’t—but it has been translated into many other languages. So we began discussing the possibility of an Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) translation to help students engage more fully with the material.
We’re a small department, 17 faculty members, with only three or four involved in the translation, so we expect it to take 12 to 18 months.
What do economics students in Indonesia tend to struggle with?
Economics education here tends to focus heavily on big-picture issues—macroeconomics, government spending, development, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). What CORE can provide is a strong behavioural and microeconomic foundation for analysing those larger issues.
Microeconomics teaches students how to think about incentives, price-setting, wage-setting, and those tools are essential for understanding macro problems. One challenge early on is introducing graphs. Mathematics is largely off the table for principles courses, as both math and English are weak points for many students, especially those from rural areas.
We often see students drop out because of difficulties with math or English. So, for principles, our goal is to train students to think intuitively about economics. We may limit the use of graphs and focus more on explanation and intuition in class.
Localised examples are also extremely important, using familiar names, places, and currency, so students feel grounded in the material.
At this early stage, have you made any key decisions about the translation process?
We’ll start with the glossary and the first unit. I’ve already begun translating the glossary. I received guidance from Christian Tode from the Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg (who led the German translation team), who used AI for some of the translation. We’re still deciding whether to use AI or do everything manually. AI is fast, but manual translation gives us deeper familiarity with the material.
One decision we’ve made is not to translate certain technical terms, for example, “game theory” or “economic rent”. This maintains consistency with how they’re used in CORE and other economic texts. In our experience, students learn specific terms better when they are presented in English with their meaning explained in Bahasa Indonesia. Translating those terms like these literally is confusing because of the way certain words are explained in our language. For economic education purposes, it’s better to retain the original terms and explain the meaning and context in the glossary. That’s where we are right now.
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Many thanks to Anna for speaking with us. We’ll continue to provide updates on the adoption and translation process throughout the year. Anna is happy to share her lecture slides in full. Please get in touch if this is of interest.
