Biography

Rebecca Stein is Executive Director of the Online Learning Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania and is charged with developing a strategic plan for online learning at Penn while working closely with Penn schools to catalyze new online educational opportunities and collaboratively invigorate ongoing programs. Dr. Stein is an acclaimed and innovative teacher who has taught at Penn since 1998 serving for many years as Director of the Microeconomics Principles Program in the School of Arts and Sciences.  A health economist and Senior Fellow of the Leonard David Institute of Health Economics, she taught large sections of introductory micro-economics to almost a thousand students each year and received multiple Penn teaching awards. On the Coursera open learning platform, she has developed highly popular courses on Microeconomics: The Power of Markets and Microeconomics: When Markets Fail.  She earned a PhD (1998) and MA (1993) in Economics from Northwestern University and a BA cum laude (1992) in Economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.