Professor LEE Joon Koo is teaching the basic economics course at SNU

A Seoul National University Economics professor LEE Joon Koo teaches the most popular university-level online course. Lee’s course, Going Into Economics, is one of the many courses offered by K-MOOC (Korean Massive Open Online Course), a site that includes online courses from 11 universities throughout Korea.

From October 14, 2015 to the end of February 2016, 7630 students had registered for Lee’s online course. In March 2016 alone, 3,246 students registered for the course. Although other courses taught also had a high number of registrations, none came close to Lee’s Economics course. Some of the other popular courses were ”Creative Ideas, Achievable Creativity”, which had a total of 5,931 students registered and “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning,” which had 4,524 students registered.

Lee began his studies at SNU as an undergraduate student in economics and went to Princeton University in 1976 as an exchange student. His first position as a professor was in 1980 at the State University of New York (Albany), but he shortly returned to Korea in 1984, where he returned to SNU as a professor of economics. Lee retired last year after over 20 years of teaching at SNU, though he continues to teach on an occasional basis. According to Lee, his aim through his teaching career was to “teach in ways that would be the help the youth more easily understand economic concepts.”

Written by Yu Young Jin, coin1234@snu.ac.kr
Proofread by Professor Travis, Smith tlsmith@snu.ac.kr