December 2000
Issues in Education
New E-Journal Targets Teaching
By Erhan Erkut
If you are reading this article, odds are you are an academic. If so, your research may be in mathematical programming or inventory management, or perhaps in supply chain management or modern heuristics, or in one of the other several dozen clusters we have at INFORMS meetings and journals. You have probably read over a hundred articles in your area of research, and published your fair share. Research is part of our job. Yet the typical academic is multidimensional, and almost all spend a significant part of their careers doing something other than research: they teach. Some like it, some don't, but most do teach.
I wonder how many of us have read papers about teaching OR/MS. Going a step further, I wonder how many of us have written papers about teaching OR/MS. I suspect that most of us have read less than a handful and have written none. If teaching is one of our two primary functions, why do we treat it so differently from research? Are there no new developments in OR/MS teaching worthy of dissemination? Is teaching not sufficiently important to warrant our reading and writing time? Are we content with how OR/MS is taught in our faculties?
I will not attempt to answer these complex and contentious questions here, but I will offer one possible explanation for the lack of reading and writing about OR/MS education: we have had no place to do this. I do not believe that the 10 scholarly journals published by INFORMS have a policy against publishing education-related papers. However, most have no special sections or area editors for such papers. In fact, the only INFORMS journal that publishes articles written by OR/MS educators for OR/MS educators with some regularity (about three per year) is Interfaces.
Our area has been somewhat unique in not having an education journal. For example, economics, statistics, engineering, finance, marketing and accounting all have one or more education journals. We now have the INFORMS Transactions on Education (ITE)!
OR/MS teaching is experiencing a number of revolutions simultaneously (end-user computing, the Internet, distance learning, cooperative learning), all of which demand significant changes in teaching. Furthermore, in the last decade many business and engineering schools have demanded major changes in the way OR/MS is taught: use of real-world applications, cases, spreadsheets and collaboration with other functional areas.
Networking and cooperation among OR/MS teachers who are trying hard to cope with these changes is as important as it has ever been. The existing avenues for communication among OR/MS teachers (conference sessions, textbooks, Web sites) are inadequate for various reasons, and we need a vehicle for recording and sharing high-quality information about OR/MS teaching.
ITE's goal is not only to offer this vehicle, but also to stimulate the production of high-quality educational materials by generating academic credit for the authors through its rigorous editorial process. This is critical at a time when the importance placed on teaching is increasing in many faculties, and faculty members who are being considered for promotion are expected to have a reputation in teaching-related activities as well as research.
ITE is an electronic journal. Most journals available on the Web are the result of the migration of print versions to the electronic medium, and offer very little or no electronically enriched content. ITE has been created as an electronic journal, and we intend to take full advantage of the medium in our articles. For example, papers can include color charts, hyperlinks and animation. Authors can also append data sets and programs to their articles, which facilitates the exchange and dissemination of teaching materials.
In addition to richer content, ITE also intends to offer readers a forum for ongoing discussion of papers and ideas through a bulletin board. Other advantages for readers include ease of access and the ability to search the site for keywords and quickly locate articles of interest. From an organizational perspective, an electronic journal lowers publication costs and eliminates publication queues.
INFORMS is well aware that teaching is mission-critical and has recently taken significant steps to improve the teaching of OR/MS. We now have a Forum on Education (INFORM-ED) with several hundred members, a rich Web site, a regular column in OR/MS Today, a regular teaching colloquium and full-length education clusters at meetings and a formal outlet for teaching cases. ITE is another of these recent initiatives. Like the others, ITE was created to meet a grass-roots demand. Its future will depend on the level of interest and participation of INFORMS members.
Access to the journal site is free during the first year to allow members an opportunity to sample the journal. Please visit http://ite.informs.org/ and check out the papers in the September 2000 and December 2000 issues. If you are interested in contributing to ITE as an author, referee or sponsor, please contact Erhan.Erkut@Ualberta.Ca. Happy reading!
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Erhan Erkut is Alexander Hamilton Professor of Business at the University of Alberta School of Business. He is chair of the INFORMS Education Committee, and the founding editor in chief of INFORMS Transactions on Education.
| This is a regular column sponsored by INFORMED, the INFORMS Forum on Education. Contact Salwa Ammar at ammars@palm.lemoyne.edu |
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