Our Guest Post today comes from Dr. Ozgur Ozluk, who is Associate Professor of Decision Sciences at San Francisco State University.
Nowadays the media is filled with discussions on online education. Writers either passionately extol the virtues of MOOCs (massive open online courses), flipped classrooms and the like, or argue with similar fervor that it is a passing fad. At SFSU, where I have been teaching OM for 10 years, the student body is diverse, with unique needs. I keep asking myself: are my students ready for online education?
As a teacher, I am constantly in search of new ways to excite my students. One semester I introduce an online simulation, another I hold virtual office hours. I firmly believe that the Internet has been providing us with revolutionary models to reach our students. However, I know for a fact that my students are not prepared for a full blown online experience. In the last 4 semesters, I have repeatedly asked my OM class how many of them would prefer to have the class online (or at least as a flipped classroom). And each semester, in a class of 50-some young faces, only a couple of hands go up hesitantly.
There are several reasons for this lack of enthusiasm. First, most of my students work to support themselves through school. Many are responsible for the care of their family, making it difficult to find the uninterrupted time at home required to learn a brand new concept. Second, most are first generation college students; they have had few role models to look up to for acquiring metacognition skills and experience a hard time absorbing new subjects on their own. Third, most OM topics require a fair amount of quantitative literacy. As the products of a weak K-12 system, my students are frozen when confronted with concepts such as EOQ or LP.
So it will be a while before I can have an online OM class that will be beneficial to my student population. In the meantime, I will make sure to include as much online material to my curriculum as I can to push the envelope.