Tag: Dr. Wende Huehn-Brown

Guest Post: Student Perspectives on the Supply Chain Management Simulation

Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Supply Chain Management at St. Petersburg College in Florida. She continues her review of our five OM simulations.

Here is my review of the 5th and the last of the Heizer/Render/Munson MyOMLab simulations, Supply Chain Management (SCM).  These 3 words are often misunderstood and a passionate topic for me! This simulation puts the student in the role of the supply chain analyst thinking about order and inventory needs, offering a hands-on and visual learning opportunity. SCM is an area that few of my students have experienced, other than as a customer.  Thinking about the details that enable fulfillment of their own orders is rather eye opening.

As in real businesses, SCM decisions shape competitive abilities in a challenging manner. My students have really enjoyed practicing this simulation.  One student reflected that she valued the learning– and even felt stress as days ticked by and shipments were delayed! Some students found this simulation challenging and needed to carefully read Chapter 11 in the textbook. Most said the simulation was a great way to understand how SCM works.

This simulation is relatively fast, requiring students to pay attention to their budget, as well as customer morale.  Selecting and monitoring suppliers, responding to messages and delays, evaluating fees, etc. while meeting contract requirements on-time requires foresight.  Also, evaluating multiple suppliers with different contracts to mitigate risks means paying attention to stay with the budget. (What a timely topic given the volatility of Chinese supply chains during the caronavirus). Students quickly learn that going cheap is not always the way to go!  Also, having a plan for the consistent arrival of inventory to manage demand was less predictable than they anticipated. Key concepts for real businesses too!

Through the simulation, students can better learn SCM and see opportunities to improve performance.  Students often found themselves reacting to unexpected situations when they did not have a clear plan to balance ordering enough inventory without going over budget while fulfilling customer orders.

 

Guest Post: Student Perspectives on the MyOMLab Quality Management Simulation

Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Supply Chain Management at St. Petersburg College in Florida. She continues her review of our five OM simulations.

As shared in prior guest posts, the Heizer/Render/Munson MyOMLab simulations offer a realistic scenario to help students further evaluate their OM lessons. The Quality Management simulation uses the hospitality industry, in which students role play a restaurant manager. This simulation helps students see the details that go into improving quality for an organization to be more successful. Almost 60% of my students found this relatable to their work experiences.

This simulation challenges students to use the quality management principles from the textbook. Students need to think logically about the evidence they are given to make decisions about various investments to improve customer service and reduce failure rates. Visualizing the options to prioritize further actions needed gives students some insight on what a manager must deal with, especially when pressured to turn around a restaurant. The various problems students are given really does draws them into the scenario!

Students reflected on options that supported immediate operating needs, as well as options that may be nice to consider, but did not necessarily address complaints or fix major issues. One student came up with several ideas, not even built in the simulation, that were great examples of critically thinking about the lessons to extend additional realistic options.

Students need to sift through the feedback they are given to identify relevant customer and staff issues to support their financial and customer service goals. The majority of the students felt the simulation was fun as it gave them a sense of accomplishment and pride to positively influence profits and customer reviews over the simulated one-year time period. Some students further commented how the simulation was driving them to even improve quality at their work!

Guest Post: Comparing Blended vs. On-Line OM Classes at St. Petersburg College

Wende BrownOur Guest Post comes from Wende Huehn-Brown, who is Professor of Business at St. Petersburg College in Florida.

Last year I shared some of my experiences and efforts to increase student success in online courses for operations management at Jay and Barry’s OM Blog. At my college, we define student success as the portion of students earning a C or better as their final grade. Here are the past 3 years of data:

Modality Spring 2013 Spring 2014 Spring 2015
Online 57% 73% 78%
Blended 92% 88% 75%

 

Overall we have sustained further improvements in online student success. The same pencasts have been used (see example in this 2013 Guest Post) since Spring 2014 (unfortunately my smartpen died, but I just obtained a new one to work on adding pencasts).  Several updates have occurred in the screen captured videos.  These improvements added and updated some problems, but more importantly were uploaded to YouTube so students can access from mobile devices and all videos were closed captioned to be ADA compliant.

While blended student success rates remain strong, we have seen a decrease. Basically, more students are attempting online classes, then moving to blended courses if unsuccessful online.  Enrollment has actually grown almost 50% over this three year time period (the college doubled the number of sections offered both online and blended).  Some weaker students appear to be recognizing their learning need to take tougher quantitative business classes in a blended format. Yet other students find recorded learning objects an effective supplement to the textbook and MyOMLab to further support online learning. Pencasts and videos were only used in a tailored study plan. Students are expected to practice in the study plan first and then critically think further about applying the analytical methods in other graded homework, quizzes or exams, or projects (which do not have these recorded resources).

Guest Post: Teaching OM Using a Smart Pen

Wende BrownDr. Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Business at St. Petersburg College. Her earlier Guest Post describes her blended learning course. 

I am constantly trying to integrate evolving technology in my entirely online classes to help students with the learning objectives.  I further provide these online resources to blended students as reference materials for additional help on study plan and homework submissions they need to complete outside of class.  A couple of years ago my husband gave me a smart pen for Christmas– the Echo LiveScribe pen (see http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/smartpen/echo/). At first, I found learning to use and sharing the output in my online classes a challenge. But in the past year LiveScribe seemed to resolve this issue with an Adobe format which makes it much easier (see example  Problem 1.9 ).

This past fall I started adding pencast tutorials like this example to my Operations Management course using select Study Plan problems.  I had viewed similar tutorials others developed for math classes and thought it might be helpful for my students in operations management.  I typically find my students really struggle with the analytics in this field.  At this point I have a small sample size, and I further complicated my data collection and analysis for comparison purposes by changing homework requirements (actually added further work to better align with another university for articulation).  While making the homework more challenging, the overall average grade went from a C to a B since I developed 31 pencasts!  Students tell me they can replay these pencasts multiple times to help the analytical concepts ‘sink in’.  I also have 24 other video tutorials showing students how to use POM for Windows or Excel OM to solve similar study plan problems.  Yet students tell me “the pencasts helped the most” in their feedback.

Wende can be reached at huehnbrown.wende@spcollege.edu.

Guest Post: Reinforcing Key Concepts in Your OM Course with Discussion Boards

Dr. Wende Huehn-Brown, at  St. Petersburg College, provides her Guest Post today on the interesting subject of discussion boards.

With students retaining less than 20% of what we may say in a physical class, figuring out a communication system to reinforce key concepts can be vital to learning.  In MyOMlab there are tools for real-time communications such as Chat and ClassLive, as well as traditional email communication tools.  This guest blog will focus on how a Discussion Board may be used.

Two years ago, I read “Weblog Technology for Instruction, Learning, and Information Delivery” ( by J.P. Shim and C. Guo, Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, Jan., 2009).   The authors showed how discussion boards can be used in a Learning Management System (LMS).  This was kind of a light bulb moment for me and led to rethinking how I create discussion boards.  According to B.W. Dearstyne’s article “Blogs, The New Information Revolution?” ( Information Management Journal, 2005), boards are a “… means of collecting and organizing fresh insights and opinions … fostering knowledge and information sharing as a way of enhancing productivity”.  Doing a blog outside the LMS can further enhance connectivity to other people, organizations, other classes, etc.

I originally started with further discussion of key concepts and case questions in the lesson.  This often extended into service management and integrating other disciplines (such as  marketing and  finance) through adaptive learning concepts, and to providing further tips on completing submissions (i.e., additional tutorials, as I have quite a few students that struggle with math).  There is further peer-to-peer learning that provides a perception of personalized learning and interaction with the profession.  My discussion boards have evolved to include Frequently Asked Questions on assignments to help students in an open format–especially those students that seem to fear asking questions.  Additionally, I  share events going on; either local ones they can attend (i.e. competitions, scholarships, professional organization networking, etc.) or news stories relative to the lessons (thanks, Jay and Barry … I often use your OM blog).

Students frequently comment positively on the way discussion boards work in this class.  What are your creative ways to use discussion boards?