Tag: class preparation assignments

Guest Post: Is Your Class Model Preparing Students for Career Success?

Beverly Amer is President’s Distinguished Fellow in the W.A. Franke College of Business at Northern Arizona University. She is also author of a workbook for college students on practicing soft skills and director of the 45 videos we provide with our text

Chances are good you’ve followed recent trends and have blended or flipped your OM course. Great! You’re modeling the kind of “workplace” students will join when they start their careers. They’ll be expected to source and evaluate resources independently, and come to work with knowledge, ready to contribute. But I suspect you’ve encountered a few bumps along the way, not the least is student confusion about what’s expected of them when so much of the “work” – that which you used to lecture over in class – is squarely on their shoulders.

My flipped undergraduate courses have benefited greatly from what I call a “student responsibility agreement.” It’s a simple syllabus appendix that explains our class model’s role in preparing them for career success, and my expectations of them. We all have classroom expectations, but reframing them along the lines of “career preparedness” can change the lens students use to view how their class behavior now can impact their future. I give this piece of advice: “If you can be the person in the room who not only identifies the problem, but generates 1 or 2 workable solutions, you’ll be viewed as an asset everyone will want on their team.”

So here goes – my list that moves the student from passive recipient of information to active participant in knowledge acquisition: (1) Read syllabus policies and schedules and use a calendar to avoid missed deadlines; (2) Start work on assignments well before the deadline so there’s time to seek help, if needed; (3) Build relationships with classmates for out-of-class work so in-class contributions are more meaningful; (4) Maximize efficiency by figuring out technology needs – and backups – before needed; (5) Don’t waste the time of your instructor by asking questions already answered in FAQ files, the syllabus, or other assignment materials; (6) Technology failures are never an excuse for missed deadlines; and (7) Sending me an email excuse for failure to finish right before a deadline does not guarantee any acceptance of such excuse.

Earth-shattering? Probably not. But laying a foundation of expectations early and explaining why learning to be a self-starter and problem-solver now can only benefit your students later.

Teaching Tip: Class Preparation Assignments (CPAs) in OM

classImagine a world where your students came to your operations management class prepared! Class time would be so much more productive and enjoyable for you and students alike. We would have informed class discussions and focus on students applying, analyzing, and evaluating the material under our expert guidance. Prepared students are not a mirage. Students will come to class prepared, but it requires a different course design. “Consider a course,” writes Faculty Focus (Feb. 16, 2015), “that uses class preparation assignments (CPAs) to inform and stimulate class discussion and a grading system that makes being prepared for class easier.”

The CPAs are assignments whose questions serve as a guide to the students in their reading, prepare them for class, and serve as a basis for class discussion. If you adopt this course design, students will come to class prepared. Therefore, you won’t have to lecture as if the students are seeing the material for the first time. Instead, you can engage the students with active learning strategies that go after higher-level learning and skill development.

How can you do this? There are any number of pre-class assignments you can make. But Jay and I think the easiest approach is to use MyOMLab. We usually assign 10 questions, taken at random from the Test Bank in MyOMLab, that correspond to the chapter(s) being covered this week. And we randomize them so each student has a different set. We also like assigning some of the OM Readings (articles like you would find in this blog). Each reading has 4 multiple choice discussion questions for students to answer. These “pre-tests” need not be worth more than 10% of the total course grade. Students are generally happy to do such open-book assignments for which they can score 100%. The tenet of this course design is that students with such assignments can acquire a basic understanding of the material themselves before coming to class.