Tag: online courses

Teaching Tip: 10 Core Practices of Teaching OM Online

Even before COVID, higher education was becoming increasingly virtual. Once the pandemic took hold, we quickly transitioned to online delivery, and began looking for simple solutions to make OM classes more engaging. Research in AACSB’s BizEd (Nov. 2, 2020) suggests 10 core practices:

No. 1: Provide a variety of relevant and timely feedback. This includes mechanisms that foster student-to-student feedback. Students need to focus on their own learning, believe the feedback is credible, and stay motivated.

No. 2: Keep students informed with regular communication. Send communications on a predictable basis using a standard medium. This promotes consistency and efficiency in the course, enables students to be proactive, increases confidence, and reduces stress.

No. 3: Curate content that is accessible to all students. Provide content, including lectures, in mixed media forms that allow students to read, listen, view, and engage with the material.

No 4: Coordinate all activities and due dates though a central calendar. This helps students manage their own time, take responsibility for their learning, and be accountable for their coursework.

5. Create a 2-way conversation with students. Meet with students both synchronously during live activities and asynchronously in forums. This creates a sense of connection, increases your presence within the class, and builds a trusting relationship.

6. Ensure the students’ user experience is friendly and strong. Provide an easy-to-navigate online structure and setup for the course. This encourages students to leverage LMS features that save time, while reducing errors.

7. Protect the academic honesty and integrity of the course. Create valid and reliable assessment procedures, like MyOMLab, that mitigate cheating. This ensures the course is fair.

8. Build a learning scaffold of activities that require the use of course content. Develop a set of tasks in which assignments build on each other.

9. Facilitate an engaging collaborative learning community. Create activities in which students engage with each other. This encourages peer-to-peer support, reduces confusion, and increases student commitment for the course.

10. Frame the learning outcomes in ways that are meaningful. Explain how the outcomes connect to all elements of the course, as well as to students’ professional aims.

Teaching Tip: Simple Strategies to Reduce Cheating on Online Exams

The end of the academic term, of course, brings final exams and cumulative assessments to test students’ knowledge of OM course materials. With so many college students taking online courses (and that number expeditiously increasing) so will the need for administering exams within the online learning environment, writes Faculty Focus (May 11, 2020). Even without expensive virtual proctoring tools, there are many ways that instructors can leverage the inherent features within their institution’s Learning Management System (LMS) and within MyOMLab to decrease cheating during online examinations. Here are 6 ways to do so:

  1. Use varied question types. Refrain from having an exam with all multiple choice or true and false questions. Our MyOMLab’s algorithmic problems are a perfect complement to these questions.
  2. Creatively remind students of academic integrity policies. Create and post a video explaining the guidelines for the online exam and review the institution’s academic integrity policy and consequences that are listed in the course syllabus.
  3. Require students to sign an academic integrity contract. After reviewing the academic integrity reminder video, have students electronically sign a contract that lists what the university considers cheating.
  4. Restrict testing window. Similar to how on-campus final exams have a designated testing slot for each course, create the same online. Have every student start the exam around the same time and limit how long each student will have to take the exam. If you have students in different time zones, consider offering three sets of tests, at 3 different start times.
  5. Change test question sequence. In the test settings, have the order of test questions be different for each exam along with the order of answer choices for each test question.
  6. Delay score availability. Set a later date after the testing window ends for students to see their score and feedback and do not make the score available for immediate view after test completion. This way, one student who finishes early cannot see their score and then advise students who have not completed the test yet.

These are just a few ideas. Care to share your own tips with a comment below?

Teaching Tip: Preparing Your Online OM Course

Just a few days ago, I received an email from an OM colleague who will be teaching his first online course–and seeking advise. Both instructor and student have concerns: assignment quality/rigor, technology, the course management system, course design, the expected workload. One of the greatest concerns, though, is the instructor’s presence on the course, writes Faculty Focus (Sept. 16, 2019). Online instructors should view themselves as crucial as the technology they are using.

Just as people weave their digital experiences, the student is performing the same process in the online educational environment. Based on a student’s digital behavior on the course, the instructor may better tailor assignments (such as how long it takes to read items the student has posted), adjust activities according to student assignment interaction, or make changes based on the student’s “digital record.”

Email, texting, chat apps, social media, and video encompass faster and immediate communication, and educators can implement these into their own online learning environment. Students are accustomed to immediate responses, so this conditioned behavior is expected within an online course. The instructor can provide a personalized experience for the student through prompt response time to emails, video chats, virtual office hours, audios to explain assignments, blogs, and a personal introduction video. These approaches communicate with the student fast and efficiently, contributing greater presence of the instructor in the online environment.

How online educators present themselves to the student, or how they frame themselves (talking about pets, hobbies, etc.), impacts positive behaviors on the course, opens the lines of communication, and affects student perception of the course in general. By providing a strong online presence, the educator has facilitated student engagement and encouraged active learning.

But one should be aware of the time the course will take. Time must be spent when developing audios for assignment, which may change from semester to semester. Video chats can sometimes turn into hour long conversations and writing an immediate individual assignment response may take time from other responsibilities.

Guest Post: Teaching OM Online at FSU

Jeff-SmithDr. Jeff Smith provides today’s Guest Post. Jeff is Associate Professor of Operations Management at Florida State University

While moving to an online format enables colleges to reach a whole new segment of students, it also presents new challenges, especially true for those who teach courses such as OM.  The good news, however, is that we are getting much closer to the ability to simulate the actual classroom experience given the different technological platforms that are now available.  In contrast, the challenges of the virtual environment are still daunting and require a new perspective.  I view the challenges along 3 broad dimensions.

The 1st is comprehensiveness and contingency planning.  You simply have to think a little more outside the box on this front.  Specifically, you need to think of every possible way that something can fail and try to put in controls to account for that.  As an example, I teach students in locations that span the globe so you need to be crystal clear on all dates and times as this will establish the baseline for all course activities.  Beyond that, there are always technological issues that cause problems.

The 2nd component is time commitment and information processing.  When teaching on campus, you know exactly what days/times you will meet so you can plan your work load around that.  In the online environment, this is simply not the case since you will often have students working around the clock–and they expect you to be doing the same. Online classes also often are larger, so the total amount of individual communication you have to process is exponentially larger.  The overall time commitment can be 2-3  times more intense in this setting.  I have found that the best way to handle the added information is to ‘batch’ all the requests and select 2 distinct times per day to sit and respond to all the requests.

The final challenge is that you have to be much more creative in getting information to your students.  A live class enables you to explain something via an inter-personal exchange. The online environment does not allow for this.  For example, for a given topic, I try to supply a power point lecture to accompany each chapter in the Heizer-Render text.  I will also find videos, popular press mentions, and websites to add more support to what I am covering.  Finally, I pre-record lecture snippets aimed at adding clarification to the more difficult topics or for working through specific example problems. (I use Tegrity and record these as 15-20 minute clips that can be downloaded to different devices by each student).

Guest Post: Teaching OM in Both Online and Blended Courses

Dr. Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Business at St. Petersburg College. She has 17 years of engineering and management experience and holds a Ph.D. from the U. of Missouri-Rolla. She can be reached at huehnbrown.wende@spcollege.edu.

Five years ago I began teaching Operations Management using the Heizer-Render text entirely online.  I quickly saw how online students struggled with learning the lessons compared to my blended students.  So I spent many hours creating screen capture tutorials that worked through similar homework problems, as well as a lecture series to help students integrate the concepts and evaluate how they are applied in organizations.  I have used this technology in my classes for the past four and a half years. 

Currently, there is quite a bit of discussion about the evolving focus in online courses, but I want to emphasize we cannot overlook the impact on student learning.  In the blended classes I am able to add to this online format with active learning activities, simulations, and games at physical class meetings.  In January, 2012 I started using the New Design MyOMLab (I began the prior version in Fall, 2010).  I have always seen how blended student grades were significantly better than the grades of entirely online students.   (In the New Design instructor tools you can now view student performance by AASCB standards).  At this point my sample size is small, but blended students showed a 14% improvement in analytical skills and reflective thinking skills over online students.  These are vital skills our organizations need to be more competitive in today’s global marketplace.

Considering that all other course resources were the same, except for the blended physical class meeting, it left me pondering that modality value to student learning.  I acknowledge the integration of active learning activities, simulations, and games in our OM discipline.  Obviously, I have more data to collect, but I wanted to share the major impact on vital learning standards and encourage colleagues in this field to share their results.  What are your results?