Principles of Microeconomics
Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com
This is a complete course: fifteen instructional weeks and a finals week, every student component, built with The Course Maker and ready to import. Weeks are relative (Week 1 to Week 16); you set the dates when you import it. Browse the whole thing below. Click any piece to read it in full, then click back to return here.
Nothing here is locked behind a signup. The course is the proof.
Download this course
This course is free, complete, and evergreen, and it is yours to keep; free downloads run through June 30, 2028. Students pay $0 for course materials: the readings and videos are links to freely available resources.
Pick the number of instructional weeks in your term; exam weeks sit on top of them. An edition marked “coming soon” is not built yet: asking for it tells us to build it, and we email you when it is ready.
This edition is built and ready to download.
Get the free 15-week pack — by email.
Enter your email address and we will send you a download link for the complete Principles of Microeconomics course: a zip with the course cartridge (.imscc) and the instructor pack. It works once and expires in 24 hours. No account and no password.
Before you import, read the import guide. Every pack is provided under the Sample Course License: use it and change it in any course you teach; do not redistribute it.
Want this course on your term's calendar and aligned to your institution's course outline and learning outcomes? The Course Maker builds custom editions, each with an alignment report designed to support program review and accreditation. Learn more: thecoursemaker.com
What the paid build adds
This sample is complete and yours to keep. A paid build is the same course made yours in the ways a download cannot be:
- Every date set to your term and your breaks, and re-paced to a second campus calendar at no extra charge.
- Your syllabus, your policies, and your outline of record in the build, with an alignment report that shows which component addresses each objective and SLO, and a Universal design for learning section drawn from the course's own data.
- Your name on every page as the course's creator.
- Kept current every term: fresh assessment variants, every link re-checked and the dead ones replaced, and the subject brought up to date where it has moved.
- The full instructor pack: answer keys and worked solutions, the alignment report, and the UDL map.
- A record for your college's file: the design attestation, a disclosure statement for every edition, and what changed at the end of each term.
Included in every course
ChapterRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee.
Slide deck with speaker notesRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — a slide deck with speaker notes, a chapter to read, and captioned videos — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee.
Captioned video linksRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — captioned videos, a chapter to read, and a slide deck with speaker notes — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee. We link videos only when a caption track exists (from the creator or generated automatically), and we never host them.
Like what you see? Build your own.
Give The Course Maker your topic and term dates, approve the plan, and download a complete Canvas course like this one — paced to your calendar and owned by you. $500 founding rate through June 2028 ($1,000 list).
Policies, schedule, and grading
Assignment groups & weights
Configured in the export — the gradebook is set the moment the course is imported.
| Assignment group | Weight | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tutorials & Practice | 10% | |
| Quizzes | 10% | |
| Workshops | 20% | |
| Assignments | 25% | |
| Discussions | 15% | |
| Exams | 20% | |
| Total | 100% | Letter Standard |
What students will be able to do
Use the tools of economic modeling — scarcity, opportunity cost, the production possibilities frontier, comparative advantage, and the gains from trade — and distinguish positive statements (what is) from normative statements (what ought to be).
Explain how demand and supply determine a market's equilibrium price and quantity, and predict how a shift in demand or supply changes them.
Compute and interpret price, income, and cross-price elasticities of demand by the midpoint formula, and relate price elasticity to total revenue.
Measure consumer surplus, producer surplus, and market efficiency, and analyze price ceilings, price floors, taxes, and subsidies, including who bears a tax and the deadweight loss.
Describe a firm's short-run production and costs — total, marginal, and average product; diminishing marginal returns; and fixed, variable, total, average, and marginal cost — and distinguish accounting profit from economic profit.
Analyze perfect competition and monopoly with the profit-maximizing rules (P = MC for a price taker; MR = MC for a monopolist), the shutdown rule, long-run entry and exit, and the deadweight loss of market power.
Analyze monopolistic competition and oligopoly, including a two-player game, the prisoner's dilemma, and Nash equilibrium, and analyze labor markets as derived demand with the value-of-the-marginal-product hiring rule.
Analyze market failures — externalities, public goods, common resources, and asymmetric information — evaluate responses such as corrective taxes, cap-and-trade, and private bargaining, and survey behavioral economics and the measurement of inequality evenhandedly.
Build, manipulate, and read microeconomic models — shift the right curve the right way and find the new equilibrium; compute an elasticity, a surplus, a cost, or a profit-maximizing output — and interpret the results in words.
Apply economic reasoning to real-world choices and policies, distinguishing positive analysis from normative judgment and weighing competing arguments and evidence fairly.
How this course is built — read this first
Every teaching module carries the same set, in the order a student meets it: a Start Here overview, the chapter (the primary reading), the lecture (titled “Lecture: <module title>”), the slide deck with speaker notes, readings & resources (links only), the lecture tutorial and practice exercises worked with an AI tutor, the quiz, the discussion and the assignment, and the weekly Model Workshop. Exams: the midterm in Week 8 and the final in Week 16, a finals week with no module.
The discussion and the assignment each ship in both formats: the adaptive version is the published, graded item, and its traditional alternative (no AI) is a separate item that ships unpublished beside it. An instructor who prefers the traditional format publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one.
What you see here is every student page. The instructor pack (answer keys and worked solutions, rubric calibration, image prompts, audio-brief scripts, and the alignment report) ships only in the download, never on this site.
Discussions & assignments: both formats in every module
Same learning objective either way; what changes is how the work happens.
Work it through with an approved chatbot
The student does the work in a guided conversation with an approved chatbot, using a copy-paste prompt the course provides. For a discussion, the AI is a Socratic partner that challenges their thinking and never writes the post. For an assignment, the AI is a coach: it asks questions, checks the reasoning shown, and waits for the student to revise. The student submits the chat link with the required summary or report.
The familiar way, one click away
The student does the work themselves and submits it, and the instructor grades it against the rubric. No AI required. It ships unpublished, opening with a one-line note to the instructor; publish it instead of the adaptive version if you prefer.
Every week, every component
Each week is a heading; every component under it links to the full student page. Week 8 is a teaching module that also carries the midterm bundle; Week 16 is the finals week, with the final exam bundle and no module.
Scarcity, Opportunity Cost, the PPF & Economic Models
Comparative Advantage, Specialization & the Gains from Trade
Demand
Supply & Market Equilibrium
Elasticity
Consumer & Producer Surplus & Market Efficiency
Government Intervention: Price Controls, Taxes & Subsidies
Midterm Review & Exam
The midterm exam bundle