Greg Mankiw writes textbooks, he has the ear of policy makers as former chair of the Council of Economics Advisers, and he connects with the hoi polloi through his blog.  But his day job is teaching economics as a professor at Harvard.  He writes in a New York Times op-ed that the global economic crisis has not drastically altered the teaching of introductory economics.  But he does outline four ways in which "the teaching of basic economics will need to change," given the events of the last few years:

The role of financial institutions;

The effects of leverage;

The challenge of forecasting;

and The limits of monetary policy: 

The textbook answer to recessions is simple: When the economy suffers from high unemployment and reduced capacity utilization, the central bank can cut interest rates and stimulate the demand for goods and services. When businesses see higher demand, they hire more workers to meet it.

Only rarely in the past did students ask what would happen if the central bank cut interest rates all the way to zero and it still wasn’t enough to get the economy going again. That is no surprise; after all, interest rates near zero weren’t something that they, or even their parents, had ever experienced. But now, with the Federal Reserve’s target interest rate at zero to 0.25 percent, that question is much more pressing.

Read Mankiw's That Freshman Course Won’t Be Quite the Same here.