Today’s Guest Blog is from Professor Howard Weiss at Temple University’s Fox School of Business and Management. Dr. Weiss is the developer of both POM for Windows and Excel OM, the two problem-solving software packages available free to adopters of our OM texts.
I started using myomlab when it first came out in Fall of 2009. In spite of a few difficulties that occurred with the automated grading that first semester, my students loved myomlab. This past semester has gone even better for my students due to the Copy feature that has been 
added to myomlab and the Paste from myomlab feature that has been added to POM for Windows and Excel OM. These features enable students to copy data from problems where the data is expressed in table form. The table of data can be copied from myomlab and then pasted into Excel and then manipulated or pasted directly into either a model created in POM for Windows or a model generated by Excel OM.
The advantages are obvious. Students do not waste their time entering data but rather use the time obtaining and interpreting results. Essentially, my students this year spent less time on homework assignments than my students from last year and also had more time to think about the problems during the exams since they spent less time entering data. In addition, the automated copy of data from myomlab eliminates the possibility that the student will get a problem wrong due to a data entry error. Sadly, students still get problems wrong in other ways, such as by using the wrong model, selecting the wrong method or choosing the wrong output value as their answer but they won’t get a problem wrong by mistyping a number.
I always give my own course evaluation at the end of each semester where I ask students for feedback about the specifics of the course rather than the general feedback that is asked of students by Temple University. Once again, each and every student indicated that I should continue to use myomlab. The best comment was, “That is amazing! I was able to copy the data set right into POM and I solved the problem.”