OR/MS Today - October 1998 - Issues in Education

October 1998

Teachers' Aid from INFORMS

By Peter Bell

The design and delivery of the basic OR/MS course in the business school has emerged as a hot issue. Pressure to re-engineer our courses is motivated by the competitiveness of the marketplace, combined with the need for schools to attract large numbers of good students prepared to pay high fees. Students and other key "customers" (such as major recruiters) are now routinely consulted and listened to in planning what is taught and how it is delivered. It is no longer sufficient, if it ever was, to design our OR/MS courses based on what and how we were taught as students. The challenge facing OR/MS instructors is to learn how to deliver courses that are well-received by students. If we succeed in this, OR/MS will prosper within our business programs, but if we fail our OR/MS courses face cancellation.

While many schools do not reward good teaching directly in the promotion and tenure process, I would argue that the future of OR/MS depends to a significant extent on our ability to excite business students to the prospect of using OR/MS in their future careers. I hope that we can appeal to faculty to pay attention to their teaching as a point of professional responsibility, and try to emphasize the personal satisfaction that results from delivering a well-received course. Perhaps at some point, we will be able to persuade more universities to consider teaching effectiveness formally within the P&T process.

Several new initiatives from INFORMS and others supported by INFORMS are aimed at helping OR/MS instructors improve their classroom performance. These include greatly extended sessions on topics related to teaching at the INFORMS national conferences, including an extensive series of workshops on teaching with spreadsheets at the fall conference in Seattle. A major initiative underway is the development of an INFORMS teaching materials collection, designed to make high quality teaching materials available to OR/MS instructors. We are currently seeking a founding Editor-in-Chief who will take leadership responsibility for assembling this collection and shaping this new initiative (for further details see the announcement in the June 1998 issue of OR/MS Today, page 56).

It may come as a surprise (or perhaps a disappointment) to some to learn that there is pretty good evidence that business students, particularly MBAs, are not particularly interested in "academic" learning. Most business students pay the high tuition fees with the expectation that they will take away something marketable: They look to their courses to provide them with skills and knowledge that will enable them to make money. OR/MS fits the needs of these students very well, as long as the course is delivered with a very practical applications orientation. My own efforts to try to do this have resulted in the extensive use of teaching cases that provide students with experience in actually using OR/MS tools to solve real problems. I find that a carefully chosen set of cases can provide students with a pretty good idea of the breadth of problems where OR/MS can create value, while at the same time developing student skills at actually using OR/MS tools across a broad spectrum of applications. (My own course, including about 40 cases, is available in the text "Management Science/Operations Research: A Strategic Perspective" from SouthWestern College Publishing).

Instructors who wish to use OR/MS teaching cases will have to look harder than their colleagues in marketing or strategy where case use is much more ingrained. We are, however, beginning to expand the availability of OR/MS cases. Twelve INFORMS/Wiley Cases are available now. Development of these cases based on applications from the Edelman Prize competition was sponsored by INFORMS and CPMS as a first step of an initiative to begin providing high quality OR/MS teaching materials. Teaching notes provide suggestions for classroom use of the cases including suggested student assignments and classroom discussion issues. Short (10 minute) videotapes, which highlight the impact of the work and provide a useful "wrap-up" for the end of the class, are available for each organization. Some of the cases include sufficient details that students can build and solve the models; others emphasize model formulation or problem definition, while others are more "strategic" or managerial. (For more details contact Wiley or the INFORMS office).

A useful step in putting together a good course is to look around at what others are doing. Luckily, we have a number of OR/MS instructors who consistently deliver courses that attract rave reviews from students, although identifying and learning from our "star" teachers has not always been easy. INFORMS supported a teachers workshop on Teaching MS with Spreadsheets organized by Steve Powell and held at the Tuck School in June 1998 (see page 40). The overwhelmingly positive response to this workshop (including the fact that it was sold out!) has resulted in the second workshop on Teaching MS being scheduled for June 26-29, 1999 at the Richard Ivey School of Business. The topic for this second workshop will be Interactive Teaching Methods for OR/MS with an emphasis on teaching using cases and games. We are currently in the process of recruiting faculty and assembling the program. An intensive series of "hands-on" sessions designed to prepare instructors to effectively use cases in the OR/MS course is planned. We are also hoping to provide participants with an opportunity to try several of the games that are proving to be effective and popular instructional aids (for example, the "Lego game" and the "Beer" game).

INFORMS is supporting a number of initiatives to help instructors learn new teaching methods and to make quality teaching materials more widely available. It is time for INFORMS' academic members to take advantage of these initiatives, and make a commitment to deliver courses that our students find interesting and exciting. If we can do this, I have no doubt that OR/MS will prosper.

Peter Bell is a professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario.

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