October 2000
Internet Use:
Are Instructors Up to Speed?
A study of undergraduate operations research and management science courses reveals a gap in teacher training on information superhighway
By Roger J. Gagnon and Ravi Krovi
The information superhighway has become a crucial link necessary for businesses to achieve and sustain competitiveness for several important reasons. Business systems are increasingly global in ownership, operations, distribution and resource needs. Business managers must now have dependable and rapid communication links with suppliers, distributors, business associates, academicians, consumers and even governments. The operations research problems companies face (e.g., forecasting, inventory, purchasing and distribution, production scheduling, facility location, financing, yield management and advertising) are multinational and thus more complex. Yet, companies require ever more rapid analyses and more effective solutions since mistakes are more costly.
The Internet has become the largest global communication network, providing access not only to people, but also data, software, documents, graphics, and audio and video clips. Companies like Amazon.com are streamlining their order processing, fulfillment and inventory management functions by using new paradigms based on the concept of e-business. E-business is encouraging business managers to fuse their business processes, enterprise decision-making and applications and organizational structures. The time allowed to design, plan, produce, transport and obtain customer feedback on new products and services is being compressed. Team projects assigned to personnel from different organizational units, globally dispersed, are increasingly common. Finally, in a recent OR/MS Today article, Arthur Geoffrion writes, "If operations research has been important to the offline economy of the last half century ... it is destined to be still more valuable to the digital economy. This is especially true in such areas as supply chain management, dynamic pricing/yield management and Internet marketing." [Geoffrion, 2000]. He also provides six reasons why OR is playing a key role in the emerging digital economy:
- OR excels at squeezing value from data.
- E-business is adding more complexity to organizations by demanding more alliances, more inter-company focus and process integration.
- OR techniques are designed to deal with complexity.
- Due to the rapid pace of business and technological change, the past (e.g. data, events) may be a poor guide to the present and particularly the future; this introduces added business risk and uncertainty. However, OR has effective tools for managing risk and coping with uncertainty.
- OR is perhaps the most effective way known to achieve an in-depth understanding of many business issues.
- OR tools are very efficient at addressing repetitive decisions of the same nature. These tools can even be embedded within information systems and e-business software and can perform their roles automatically.
However, texts, cases, homework assignments, articles, innovative instructional formats, etc. utilizing these information resources in an appropriate pedagogical context for undergraduate OR/MS courses are still emerging. Also, the sharing of information concerning actual educational benefits and drawbacks appears sparse.
As part of a larger study, we conducted a survey of faculty members of the Decision Sciences Institute who identify operations research/management science as their primary, secondary or tertiary academic interest areas. We asked these professors instructing undergraduate, introductory OR/MS courses to assess their experiences in using the Internet in these courses. We also wished to learn what obstacles the faculty felt inhibited incorporating the Internet in the development and instruction of undergraduate OR/MS courses. Finally, we wanted to determine which factors and relationships (e.g., Internet training, creation of a home page, department size and the presence of IS faculty within the department) promote Internet usage.
Results
We originally mailed 1,353 questionnaires. The following results were compiled from 106 useable returns. We did a second mailing to increase the response rate, however, since we had over 100 useable responses, we proceeded with the analysis. If time and resources permitted, it would have been useful to examine the "non-response set" to see if that group differed from the respondents. We suspect that those who use the Internet in their teaching pedagogy may have been more inclined to respond to the questionnaire. If that is the case, then the percent of faculty using the Internet in teaching would be even lower than the survey results indicate.
The availability and sophistication of computer resources can influence the use of the Internet/WWW in classroom teaching. However, most respondents (82.5 percent) indicate a level of computer hardware resources sufficient for their personal Internet usage. Most faculty report medium to high familiarity with information systems (97.1 percent) and the Internet/WWW (93.3 percent). Twenty-seven percent of faculty instructing introductory OR/MS courses report utilizing the Internet/WWW in these courses.
As illustrated in Table 1, the most commonly reported Internet application is gathering data about a company. This is followed by searching the Internet/WWW for information or data, reading homework problems and downloading a syllabus (all tied for second). These are followed by reading an article, reading a case, reading a company tour, checking homework solutions and taking an exam.
Table 1. Internet application in introductory OR/MS courses
On average, faculty who use the Internet in their introductory OR/MS courses report three types of Internet applications per course. Thus, faculty who incorporate the Internet in their classroom pedagogy seem to use it for multiple purposes.
As shown in Table 2, the most frequent reason for not using the Internet/WWW was lack of student access to computer laboratory resource. Whether this means lack of a computer laboratory, an insufficient number of laboratory computers, a lack of computers with sufficient capabilities to utilize the Internet, etc. is unknown but deserves further address. Lack of faculty training in Internet-related areas and faculty not convinced about the learning students gain from use of the Internet/WWW were tied as the second most common reasons for not using the Internet. Faculty also mentioned the lack of relevant Web sites and the lack of proper computer equipment (for students). "Lack of faculty incentives to use the Internet" was originally posed to be a likely obstacle; we were surprised to find this was not mentioned by any respondent.
Table 2. Reasons given for not using the Internet.
Only 20 percent of faculty teaching introductory OR/MS courses report formal Internet/Web training. Even less 7 percent indicate formal training in file transfer protocol (FTP), while only 16 percent indicate training in file archiving/extraction. Thus, it appears that, overall, most faculty are self-taught on the mechanics and uses of the Internet/WWW.
However, larger majorities of faculty who use the Internet in their introductory OR/MS courses report having had training in the Internet (73 percent), file archiving and extraction (27 percent) or FTP (60 percent). The percentages for the faculty incorporating the Internet in their introductory OR/MS courses and reporting training in the Internet, file archiving and extraction or FTP are nearly four times as large as the percentages for the entire set of faculty instructing introductory courses. Thus, it appears that Internet-related training does have a dramatically positive influence on the use of the Internet in introductory OR/MS courses.
Slightly less than half (47 percent) of the faculty teaching only introductory OR/MS courses have home pages. This percentage increases to 54 percent for faculty employing the Internet in their introductory courses. Perhaps surprisingly, the construction of a home page does not seem to be a major factor distinguishing those faculty who use the Internet/WWW in their introductory, undergraduate OR/MS courses from those who do not.
We hypothesized that larger departments with greater resources and the presence of IS faculty within the department may be factors that could encourage/support Internet classroom usage. However, neither of these proved to be significant factors associated with the use of the Internet in OR/MS course pedagogy.
Self-Taught Surfers
While most faculty report sufficient office computer resources for Internet usage and adequate familiarity with the Internet, slightly more than one-fourth of the faculty teaching introductory, undergraduate OR/MS courses currently use the Internet/WWW in their course pedagogy. This data does not reflect the faculty who are not currently using the Internet in their OR/MS course pedagogy, but intend to do so, or those who have used the Internet, but currently do not.
Only one in five faculty report having formal Internet-related training; even fewer report formal training in FTP and file archiving and extraction. Thus, it appears that, overall, faculty are self-taught in regards to Internet-related topics. Further research concerning veteran faculty vs. recent graduates and types of institution research vs. teaching-oriented would be informative.
Results suggest that faculty with a home page may be slightly more prone to use Internet-related pedagogy in their introductory OR/MS courses, although it not clear whether the development of a home page precedes or follows the decision to incorporate the Internet in course pedagogy. However, for introductory OR/MS courses, having a home page does not appear to be a major factor distinguishing the classroom use of the Internet/WWW.
While we had no preconceptions, department size and the presence of IS faculty within the department proved to be insignificant in their association with Internet classroom pedagogy.
What could be major factors affecting Internet classroom usage? The lack of adequate computer resources for students (not faculty) and the lack of Internet training for the faculty (not the students) were reported as two major obstacles hindering more widespread use of the Internet. Inadequate computer resources for students and access to those resources suggests several causes: inadequate computer hardware and/or software (e.g. for audio/video clips), insufficient computer (laboratory) instructional support for use of the Internet/WWW, an inadequate number of computers available for student use, and/or an insufficient availability of the computer laboratory resources (hours of operations per day, days of operations per week, number of computers in operating condition, etc.). Department heads and deans may wish to take note of this finding, since the adjustment/reallocation of resources that can remedy these obstacles may be within their discretion.
These obstacles are followed by: faculty not convinced about the learning advantages of Internet-based instruction and a lack of relevant Web sites (real or perceived). The keyword in the last obstacle mentioned may be "relevant." While there may exist numerous Web sites pertinent to OR/MS professionals and advanced students, these may not be appropriate for the undergraduate, introductory level OR/MS course [Sodhi, 1995], particularly in a business school. Even if relevant Web sites are available, gaining an awareness of them and ease of accessibility may be related obstacles. Additional benefits and efficiencies would be derived if one could link "the text to a text-assisted Web directory to the Internet to the specific relevant Web resources" in a user-friendly manner.
Technological changes in the last two years have made learning aids such as interactive quizzes and online tutorials a distinct possibility. Depending on the scope, such tools could aid students aspects ranging from problem formulation to final solution generation, and therefore, are ideal candidates for introductory OR/MS courses. We also expect better and more interactive on-line "tours" due to technologies such as VRML and Java.
Existing directories of OR/MS resources such as INFORM-ED (http://www.bus.ualberta.ca/informed/), an educational resource sponsored by INFORMS, are not only excellent forums for discussing course pedagogy, but also for accessing lists of teaching-related references. Web-based tutorials [e.g. tutOR (http://www.tutor.ms.unimelb.edu.au/), an OR-based Web resource sponsored by the University of Melbourne, Australia] also have large potential for operations research and management science courses. While several Web-based resources exist, awareness of their existence might be a problem. Hence, organizations such as INFORMS should not only establish and manage a centralized, categorized and annotated library of Web resources, but should also effectively describe and disseminate a summary of such resources in such a manner that they are widely publicized. The manner in which cases and instructional resources from the Harvard Business School and the Colgate Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia are assembled, organized and marketed both online and in hard copy provides exemplary models.
Incorporating CD-ROMs with texts (e.g., Lawrence and Pasternack, 1998) allows immediate access to an abundant inventory of instructional resources. Whether this use of CD-ROMs provides easier Internet access, aids in integrating text / CD-ROM / Internet usage (therefore promoting Internet usage), or will, by itself, be sufficiently comprehensive to reduce or render Internet usage unnecessary in OR/MS courses remains unknown.
Seamlessly linking the CD-ROM text directly to the author's Web page so that students merely click on the icon in the "electronic text" to open the Web site to the appropriate resource is an extremely beneficial pedagogical advance and addresses at least one of the reported obstacles to greater Internet usage in introductory OR/MS courses. We believe this technological/pedagogical tool will be adopted by many OR/MS authors and publishers and become a standard instructional aid in the near future.
In the final analysis, the resource issue not withstanding, encouraging faculty to use the Internet/WWW in their OR/MS course pedagogy may be a two-step process. First, learning advantages, resource availability, awareness and ease of use must be apparent in order to encourage faculty to experiment with Internet-based pedagogy. However, experimentation does not guarantee continuation. To promote continued usage, Web resource directories such as INFORM-ED have to be sufficiently comprehensive, well organized, widely publicized and constantly updated to keep pace with the field.
References
- Geoffrion, Arthur, 2000, "Cashing In on E-Commerce", OR/MS Today, Vol. 27, No. 3, p. 32-34.
- Lawrence, Jr., J. A. & Pasternack, B., 1998, "Applied Management Science," New York: John Wiley & Sons.
- Sodhi, M., 1995, "An OR.MS Guide to the Internet", Interfaces, Vol. 25, No. 6, p. 14-29.
Roger J. Gagnon is an associate professor who teaches operations management and OR/MS in the Department of Business Administration, School of Business and Economics, North Carolina A & T State University, Greensboro, N.C.
Ravi Krovi is an assistant professor at the School of Business Administration, The University of Akron, Akron, Ohio, where he teaches MIS and OR/MS.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2000 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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