There will always be controversy about content and delivery in teaching economics, but one thing we can all agree on is that we need to incorporate data into a modern macroeconomics course. It is obvious that we want our students to be aware of historical trends and the current economic environment. The days of presenting a time series that has not been updated for several years are long gone. Computers and the Internet have removed the constraint on obtaining and processing the latest measures of economic performance and financial statistics.

The Web offers an embarrassment of riches from which to obtain data. Many professors have favorite sources from blogs, aggregator sites, and government portals, such as BLS.gov, WorldBank.org, Penn World Tables, IMF.org, and GapMinder.org. We bookmark our favored sites and return to them to stay up to date and build examples for lectures and assignments. We share these sites with our students and sometimes create detailed instructions on how to use them.

One major problem with teaching students how to access data from a particular website is that it will not remain constant over time. Web redesigns and changing URLs guarantee that our instructions and handouts will be obsolete almost as fast as they are created. This constant evolution of the Web can also make updating an example or lecture handout a chore.

If several different sites are used, there is something to be said for exposing students to various interfaces, but the fixed costs of learning each site (especially if only occasionally accessed) can be quite high. For the professor who visits a site once a semester, it can be frustrating to have to remember how to navigate a site or figure out a new interface. For the student who has never downloaded data, the process can be challenging and time consuming.