Dr. Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Business at St. Petersburg College.
In my prior guest blog, I shared a pencast I created to help students learn the analytical methods for a productivity problem. I have been teaching operations management for over six years and during this time period have created 31 pencasts on various problems from the Heizer/Render OM textbook. I have also made 27 screen-captured videos using the decision science software (by Temple U. Professor Howard Weiss) that accompanies the text for free.
Some might ask why? Yes, the textbook has numerous examples to help support students to learn the analytical methods. And MyOMlab also has good learning aids available for help in solving problems. But it seems my students need more visual methods, with further explanation, to complete their homework assignments successfully.
The majority of my classes at St. Petersburg College are online. Additionally I teach a blended section, and with this advancement of technology I am better able to do other active learning exercises or simulations during this meeting time. There are a number of sources for ideas to structure activities for this meeting time available in OM. For example, I have used a few articles from the Decision Science Journal of Innovative Education. In this manner, I am able to run my blended class more as a “flipped” or “inverted” classroom. Thus I use these resources for all classes to help students learn the analytics on study plan problems. I then assign other problems without these added resources for homework and later exams. On the average, students in the blended class–with this flipped or inverted learning modality– score almost a whole letter grade better than the entirely online class where students elect not to come to this meeting time.
Can any readers share their approaches to help students learn better?