October 1996 € Volume 23 € Number 5
October 1996 € Volume 23 € Number 5
By Alfred Blumstein
At the Washington INFORMS Meeting, the INFORMS Board heard a powerful
report by a distinguished committee of business-school deans and
faculty headed by Tom Magnanti. The committee reported on the
significant decline in the enrollment in courses taught by OR/MS
faculty in business schools and the erosion of these courses from
required core curricula. This has contributed to the difficulty OR/MS
Ph.D. graduates have had in gaining academic positions, even though
most of them have had unprecedented success in getting strong offers
from industry and consulting firms.
The Magnanti committee suggested that the appeal to the students and
their sense of these courses' value and relevance is an important
factor in the enrollment decline, especially now that course
requirements have been loosened. Instructors with a captive audience
have only a limited incentive to develop a more inviting but still
demanding course. Finding ways to attract the best students becomes
an important new alarm to which we must respond. I am pleased that
this issue of OR/MS Today is devoted to the theme of "Innovative
Education," a critical challenge for our academic community.
There are many examples of challenging but interesting OR/MS courses
that also add to the students' skills and that have no shortage of
registrants. But we need to disseminate more widely the skills in
developing and delivering such courses. One of the common complaints
about OR/MS courses is that they have been excessively focused on
problem-solving skills rather than on problem-formulation or modeling
skills.
It is much easier to teach the highly structured algorithms and their
proofs -- the material the instructor learned in graduate school and
may be pursuing in his or her own research -- than to teach the
unstructured modeling skills. While such material is important for
Ph.D. students who will be preparing for methodology-oriented
research careers, it is far less relevant to students who want to
learn how to use OR methods, but who will have access to a wide
variety of software packages to execute the algorithms. They
obviously have to know the assumptions underlying an algorithm, when
an algorithm applies and when it fails, and how to carry out
sensitivity analyses, but that understanding can be communicated much
more concisely than has been the case in most methodological courses.
The software packages available today make it far less important to
dwell on the details of the algorithms.
It is much more difficult to teach the modeling skills that enable
one to translate a real-world process or phenomenon into an
analytical model. That is the inherent and distinctive art of OR/MS,
but the skill is far more artistic than knowledge-based, and that is
what makes it difficult to teach didactically.
There have been a variety of attempts to teach modeling skills
through the "modeling studio" approach (as exemplified by the courses
developed by Steve Pollock, Seth Bonder, and Dick Smallwood, among
others). The emphasis in the "studio" is on examining some problem in
the real world, and then working at converting that problem into a
model. Inevitably, the initial formulation is likely to be
excessively simple, and then the task is one of enriching the
formulation while retaining tractability.
As universities and students put more emphasis on teaching, and
especially on innovation in teaching, it is inevitable that OR/MS
professors will respond. Following a recommendation of the Magnanti
committee, and with INFORMS financial support, Steve Powell of
Dartmouth, working with Judith Liebman, chair of the INFORMS
Education Committee and Erhan Erkut, chair of the INFORMED forum,
will be developing several summer workshops for bringing innovative
approaches to the teaching of OR/MS. A preliminary indication of
those approaches was presented at the IFORS meeting in Vancouver last
summer; these are discussed in an article by Steve Powell elsewhere
in this issue, and that article provides a view of some of the
exciting innovations that are under way.
As with so much else in our field, some of the most exciting
developments are exploiting the powers of modern information
technology. Many instructors have posted the various aspects of their
course materials on the Web. One good example is the course in
Decisions Support Systems by Ramayya Krishnan of Carnegie Mellon's
Heinz School
(http://power.cba.uni.edu/isworld/dssteaching.html).
Such materials can thereby become available to anyone else who wants
to incorporate them into his or her own course. Such sharing of
teaching materials can certainly spread widely the innovations
associated with the best of teachers.
Gary Lilien and Arvind Rangswamy at Penn State have made very
interesting use of IT in teaching a course in marketing. They have
developed a book and related software that puts marketing models in
the hands of students who can apply them directly to marketing
decision problems, thereby animating marketing concepts and models
that have previously been inaccessible to most students. Five of
their software packages relate directly to past Edelman prize
finalists, so that students can apply the model themselves and then
read the paper or, even better, watch the experts on the associated
Edelman Prize videotape. Such efforts clearly require large
investments of time to develop, but they contribute in a major way to
the field. And once developed, they must enhance the stimulation and
satisfaction of the teaching process.
It is clear that some major improvements are needed in the way OR/MS
is taught, and that some of those are already under way. An important
need is to see to it that those developments are circulated widely,
and that others are thereby encouraged to follow suit. INFORMS is
pursuing that challenge.