Tag: pencasts

Guest Post: Teaching Operations Management On-line at St. Petersburg College

Wende BrownDr. Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Business at St. Petersburg College in Florida

Last year I was a guest on Jay and Barry’s OM Blog who shared some tips from my experiences teaching operations management from the Heizer/Render text in on-line courses. Now, a year later, I wanted follow up this discussion with further evidence on the value that pencasts (my Guest Post on January 12, 2013) and screen captured videos (my Guest Post on July 2, 2013) had on student success rates.

To emphasize the impact that these visual and recorded methods had on my students, let me share my student success rates this year in comparison with last year. Student successes are defined here as the portion of students earning a C or better as their final grade.  Please understand as you consider these percentages, I do have a fairly large withdrawal rate in online courses and students that withdraw are in the denominator.

Modality Spring 2013 Spring 2014
Online 56.5% 73.1%
Blended 92.0% 88.0%

Obviously, the value of physical meetings to explain concepts and demonstrate the analytics in the active learning activities I do in blended classes is very vital to student success. However, technology today does enable us to replicate some aspects from the classroom.   Since 2013, my use of these recorded media options in my Operations Management course has grown to a total well over 100 pencasts and videos. I am able to reuse these across courses and I focus on study plan problems that are not used on further graded homework, quizzes, or exams.  At the same time, student evaluations have become more positive on the course.

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.