teaching OM – Page 4 – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

Teaching Tip: Note Taking in Your OM Class

We are always looking for ideas on how to make your students successful in their study of OM. The “rotating note taker” concept comes from Faculty Focus. This student serves as the class note-taker, posting his or her notes on the course management system before the next class session. The notes are graded pass/fail and count for 1% of the final course grade. If it’s a fail, the student learns why and is assigned another day to take and post class notes.

Having a designated student taking and posting notes does not relieve other students of the responsibility to take their own notes. The posted notes serve as an alternative to the student’s own notes. They may clarify or emphasize a different part of a concept, add more detail, or offer a different perspective.

You can introduce the assignment on day one. Recruit a student familiar with the learning management system (LMS) to provide the first set of class notes. Put instructions about posting notes on the LMS, offer recommendations about attaching files, and suggest making references to the text instead of trying to reproduce complicated graphs. If your class is large, have two students taking and posting notes for each class session.

Here’s a list of benefits that accrue from the strategy.

Students report that they find the posted notes helpful when reviewing for tests. It’s an opportunity to compare what they have written with what someone else has in their notes.
If a student knows that everyone in the class is going to look at his or her notes and that the teacher is going to evaluate them, it motivates careful note-taking.
Students who aren’t good note-takers have the chance to see what a good set of notes looks like.
If students miss a class, they have access to a set of notes.
The strategy demonstrates your commitment to student note-taking.

Teaching Tip: How to Get Your OM Students to Participate More

What can we as teachers do to better promote student engagement? Here are a few ideas I extracted from Faculty Focus (June 29, 2016):

Redefine participation. Invite students to contribute electronically—with an email or post on the course website—with a question they didn’t ask in class, a comment they didn’t get to make, or a thought that came to them after class.

Cultivate a presence that invites engagement. An engaging teaching presence is communicated by behaviors that convey confidence, comfort, anticipation, and great expectations. The classroom space, whether it’s physical or virtual, is one you share. Move about in it. See who’s in class. Smile, extend a greeting, or comment on one of our recent OM in the News blogs.

Talk about why learning is important. This is not the same old lecture about how OM is such a hard course. Most students haven’t yet fallen in love with learning. They think they like easy learning, memorizing bits of information, or getting by doing the bare minimum. Let yours be the class that introduces students to learning that captivates their attention, arouses their curiosity, stretches their minds, and makes them feel accomplished.

Give students a stake in the process. We make all the decisions about learning for students. We decide what students will learn, the pace, the conditions, and whether students have learned it. You can give students some control. Let them start making small decisions—what topics they want discussed in the exam review session, whether quizzes will count 10% or 20% of their grade, whether their final project is a paper or a presentation—and watch what happens to their engagement.

Use cumulative quizzes and exams. For long-term retention of course content, student exposure to the material needs to be ongoing. Every time they retrieve what they’ve learned, that material becomes easier to remember. Students would, of course, rather have unit exams. We can help students prepare for cumulative exams by scheduling regular quizzes (and MyOMLab is perfect for this).

Guest Post: Teaching Cases in Your Undergraduate OM Class

Today’s Guest Post comes from Dr. Matt Drake, who is Associate Professor at the Duquesne U. School of Business.

Teaching cases have been a mainstay in the MBA classroom for decades. Cases possess several pedagogical benefits over the traditional lecture method: They do a good job simulating a complex decision environment, require students to separate relevant from irrelevant information, and require students to synthesize different concepts and analytical techniques to develop recommendations.

While case usage is ubiquitous for MBAs, they are somewhat less commonly employed in undergraduate classrooms. This is at least partially due to the fact that many OM undergraduate courses are designed to simply introduce concepts and techniques rather than to give the students much of a chance to apply them. That does not, however, mean that cases cannot be used effectively in any form at the undergraduate level. Your Heizer/Render OM text has over 80 1-2 page cases that are entirely appropriate for undergrads.

I have successfully introduced cases into my undergraduate courses in each of the following 3 ways:

Discussion only. Some cases do not require any sophisticated analysis and just ask students to consider the situation and generate and evaluate possible strategies. These are prime candidates to be used solely as a basis of class discussion.

Instructor presents model. Many cases require a substantial amount of modeling and analysis, but instructors may not want to allocate the class time that students need to complete the entire case analysis. In my class I ask them to summarize the decision scenario, and I lead them through the required decision analysis.

Students conduct full analysis. Some cases are so rich that I find it beneficial to have the students complete the entire case analysis as they would if they were MBAs. I assign these cases as out-of-class group homework that the students complete over 2 weeks or so. I spend anywhere from 20-60 minutes in class discussing some of the additional issues.

If an instructor is new to using cases in the classroom, I recommend that he or she start slow and introduce 1-2 cases at a time. It is not necessary to redesign a course completely.

Matt is editing a special issue of INFORMS Transactions on Education about innovative ways to use cases. He invites submissions to: http://pubsonline.informs.org/pb-assets/ITED%20Call%20for%20Papers%20-%20Cases%20-%20Final.pdf

Guest Post: Designing the Effective OM Classroom

Today’s guest Post comes from Prof. Matt Drake, who is the Witt Faculty Fellow in SCM at Duquesne University’s Palumbo-Donahue School of Business.

Most of us have heard the common refrain that a student “has never been good at math.” But I have found that the vast majority of my students possess the analytical capabilities that my courses require. Some just need to gain the confidence in these abilities. My courses are largely still lecture-based on the surface when I present new material. However, I do try to turn the class into active problem-solving sessions wherever possible to keep the students engaged.

When I present example problems, I sometimes get feedback that I go too quickly for some of them to keep up with me. As a compromise, I post the Excel files that I build during class on our course website so that students can download the files and compare their notes to mine.

I also try to use at least a few cases in each course. In my experience, students enjoy and appreciate considering the real-world decision scenarios that cases offer. I have 3 additional thoughts for designing effective OM courses:

Be understanding and flexible with deadlines and attendance, especially with part-time students. I always accept late assignments with a point deduction to be fair to other students.
Don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know.” No one person can be an expert in everything. If students ask questions to which I do not know the answer, I tell them that I do not have an answer off the top of my head. I then try to follow-up after I have had the chance to research the issue. Students seem to appreciate this honesty.
Students appreciate rapid feedback to their questions and to their work on assignments. I try to return all graded assignments within a week, and I reply to emails as soon as I can.

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

Our 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).

Teaching Tip: Cellphones in Your OM Class

As faculty, it seems we are very concerned about cell phones in the classroom. Articles about the problem are popping up everywhere in the pedagogical literature, writes Faculty Focus (Oct. 14, 2015), and they often are the “most-read” articles listed on various websites. Is student use of electronic devices that pressing of a pedagogical problem? Research makes it abundantly clear that students can’t multitask, despite their beliefs to the contrary. Even a casual observation of them texting in class while they’re supposed to be listening and taking notes makes it obvious that it’s the listening and note-taking that are getting short shrift.

Does the use of the devices make it harder for other students to focus on learning tasks? More than 60% of students say it does, according to a recent survey. However, 80% of those surveyed reported using their cell phones at least once a class, with 75% saying that doing so was either acceptable or sometimes acceptable. Students in the survey didn’t rate a university policy, a syllabus policy, or a glare from the teacher as all that effective; some 40% said they would still text in class even after a teacher reprimand.

Does the use of devices disrupt faculty? It can. Students aren’t engaging with the material when they’re on their phones, and we have leadership responsibility for the classroom environment. Also, students aren’t listening to us, and that’s rude. Should we be taking this personally? It feels like we should be doing something, but we’re justifiably reluctant to make the power moves that fix the problem when there’s such a high risk of collateral damage in our teaching evaluations. By the way, at DSI and POMS meetings I attend, faculty are on their devices not infrequently.

The bottom line: If we get too focused on the problem, then isn’t that taking away time we could be using to shape our content in interesting ways and to devise activities that so effectively engage students they forget to check devices? Maybe the best policy here is no policy, but instead some classroom discussions about the subject.

Teaching Tip: Seven Ways to Improve OM Class Discussions

Would students describe your OM lectures as “transient instructional events?” If they are asked about the lecture a few days later, are most hard-pressed to remember anything beyond what they themselves might have said? Faculty Focus (Sept. 30, 2015) offers some simple suggestions for increasing the impact of the discussions that occur in our courses.

Be more focused and for less time – The EOQ model may be fascinating to you, having taken a whole course on the topic. But after 10-15 minutes, your students zone out. They do better with short discussions—focused and specific.
Use better hooks to launch the discussion – A pithy quotation, a short scenario that requires content application, a hypothetical case or situation, a synopsis of a relevant Wall Street Journal article—all of these can jump-start a discussion.
Pause – Stop the discussion and ask students to think about what’s been said so far, or ask them to write down what struck them as important. Think short pauses, 30-60 seconds.
Have note takers – Ask whether there are 2 or 3 students who’d be willing to take notes during the discussion. Then post their notes on the course website or distribute them. This could count as class participation.
Talk less – Too many classroom discussions are still dominated by our talk. Encourage students to speak. Point out good comments that merit response. Do everything you can to make it a good student discussion.
End with something definitive – Return to the hook that launched the discussion. Ask students to write a 1-sentence summary of the discussion. Use what students have written to help them bring closure to the discussion.
Use the discussion – “Remember that discussion we had about global supply chains? What did we conclude?” Refer to individual comments made during the discussion. “Paula had an interesting insight. Who remembers what she said?” And if you really want students to listen up and take discussions seriously, use a comment made in the discussion as a question on the next quiz.

Teaching Tip: The 8 Minute OM Lecture

For decades, I taught operations management at Rollins College in classes that met once a week–in 3 hour time blocks for full time students, 4 hour classes for EMBAs. Yet numerous studies have demonstrated that students retain little of our OM lectures, with research on determining the “average attention span” congregating around 8-10 minutes (see Attention Span Statistics, 2015 or BBC, 2010). So maybe it is time to try a new approach, the 8-minute lecture, advocated in Faculty Focus (Aug. 31, 2015).

How to implement the 8-minute lecture
1. Prepare students – Explain your teaching methodology and your rationale for doing things a certain way. This helps manage students’ expectations. Many of our business students expect to mostly listen to lectures and take notes. They are less accustomed to an active learning environment that involves debates on readings (which this blog’s OM in the News articles provide for you to share with your class), small group discussions and report-backs, quick multiple choice clicker quizzes, problem sets, and short lectures.

2. Redesign/rewrite lectures – Review your lectures to identify natural breaks. Where can you pause without losing meaning? How can you use students’ knowledge from their homework and previous learning as a scaffold? For example, when covering Location Analysis (Chapter 8), your 1st lecture might be on global location decisions, 2nd on 1-2 quantitative measures, 3rd on service strategies, etc.

3. Look for areas in your lecture that instead can be learned from an image, video (there are 35 free 6-12 minute videos we have created to accompany the text), or interactive activity, and substitute accordingly. Cull through the content until you have eliminated 2/3 of your lecture material.

4. Once this topic is fully explored, give another 8-minute lecture, and then engage students in a new activity that teaches the next learning objective. At the end of class, test to ensure that the objectives had been met by asking students for a 2-to-3-sentence note card summarizing their learning.

Hopefully, the success of this method of interspersing mini-lectures with activities, discussions, and time for reflection will be validated by students’ final exam scores.

Teaching Tip: The Critical First Day of Class

There’s only one first day of class. Faculty Focus (Aug. 19, 2015) provides some ideas for taking advantage of opportunities that are not available in the same way on any other day of the course.

A good introduction to OM provides a bit of background; it builds connections by identifying shared experiences and common interests. The details offered in a good introduction motivate continued conversation.
The first day gives you the chance to explain why OM matters to you. Of all the potential majors, you chose one in this field—how did that happen?
The operations course develops important concrete analytic skills. The first day is a good time to let students know what they will be able to do—or do better—as a consequence of this course.
Courses have been known to change lives. Most don’t, but OM is probably the most dynamic subject in all of business.
Talk about your commitment to teaching–and your favorite things about teaching.
You can talk about your commitment to student learning.
It’s a chance to find out about your students in the course. This can build constructive relationships and help establish concrete ways to connect.
OM is a new course and the beginning of a new academic year. You and your students want the same things on the first day—a good course, a positive constructive learning environment, the chance to succeed.
Students may look passive and not especially interested, but don’t be fooled. On that very first day, get students connected with each other and the course content.
It’s the day in the course when it’s easiest for the teacher to genuinely smile. You have only good news to share, so let them hear it.

Teaching Tip: Lecturing in Your OM Class

“Research has long cast doubt on the use of lecture in education,” writes Faculty Focus (July 15, 2015). The book What’s the Use of Lecture? claims the biggest benefit of lecture is that it is an efficient means of reaching a large number of students in a single setting. Lectures convey information but they do little to promote thought or problem-solving abilities, or to change behavior. Despite the evidence about lecture’s weaknesses, 2/3-3/4 of faculty members continue to rely on it. As Harvard’s Derek Bok argues, though facts, theories, and concepts delivered in lecture have little value unless students can apply them to new situations, ask pertinent questions, make reasoned judgments, and arrive at meaningful conclusions. Another prof puts it this way: “You may have a lecture that works to get students to take a multiple choice test really effectively. But when you have a conversation with that student after your semester, they may not actually remember anything.”

Transforming a class, especially a large lecture class, isn’t easy–and the adjustments in an active learning class can be difficult for students, as well. Millennials have a deep fear of failure–and do not deal well with ambiguity. They like clean, firm solutions to OM problems–not thinking beyond a single “right answer.” Students have grown accustomed to sitting passively in lectures, reviewing your notes or slides posted online, attending study sessions, cramming for exams, and moving on. Many resent having to take an active role in class. Even so, a common complaint is not that professors are too demanding but that they don’t hold firmly to deadlines and expectations.

What can Jay and I do to help? Our Instructors Resource Manual provides classroom exercises for every topic. The Teaching Tips button on this blog provides more ideas for involving students. The 35 videos we made can be shown and lead to discussions in class. The OM in the News blogs provide current topics to share with your class each day so they feel there is practicality to OM. Perhaps you have an exercise you would like to share with colleagues. Just write to me (brender@rollins.edu) and I will post it for everyone to read.

Teaching Tip: Your Students Are Not Paying Attention in Class? Shocking!

We have all had the experience of having students sitting in our OM classes and knowing that they are not paying the least bit of attention. Attention, as defined in the literature, refers to the idea that students have a finite amount of cognitive resources available at any given moment to devote to a particular stimuli from their sensory environment. To that end, students’ attention is constantly shuttling between what they are experiencing externally and internally. If class is interesting and there is activity, students can focus on those activities and work to remember that information for later use. However, when class isn’t engaging, students will find other things to occupy their attention.

Sometimes, students work to multi-task while in class. In this case, students try to engage in activities on their laptop, iPad, or phone while also believing they are “paying attention” in class. But by doing so, students draw necessary resources away from immersing themselves in the content, resulting in poorer performance.

Although some of us believe that the burden of attention rests solely on the student, there are things we can do to help to keep them actively involved in their learning. For students to pay attention, there has to be sufficient need for that attention to be devoted to the material at hand. That is, we need to engage the students in ways that make it difficult for them to pay attention to anything else. There are two key benefits to this: (1) students report that the class goes by more quickly and they remember more, and (2) faculty report fewer problems in the classroom and that students seem more prepared for class.

Here are 5 strategies, writes Faculty Focus (May 4, 2015), for engaging students in the classroom that require that their attention is devoted to the class :

Ask questions and require students to write responses.
Have students respond to questions about a previous class activity.
Create mini-lectures to include time for student comment, feedback, and response.
Focus learning on student perspectives.
Create rapport with students and build a comfortable classroom climate.

Teaching Tip: Cumulative Exams in Your OM Course

“The evidence that students retain content longer and can apply it better when exams and finals are cumulative is compelling,” reports Faculty Focus (March 18, 2015). Will your students yell and scream? Yes, but for the very reason we should be using them: they force regular, repeated encounters with the content. It’s those multiple interactions with the material that move learning from memorization to understanding. Students object because they don’t know how to study for long-term retention. Here are 3 suggestions:

1. Use previous or potential test questions.

Display a question at the beginning of the session. “Here’s a test question I’ve asked previously about TQM. How would you answer it?” Give them time to talk with each other. Have them look in their notes.

Have students create a possible test question. “This material on project crashing is fair game for the exam. What might a test question about it be?” Identify those that are good. If one those student questions ends up on the test, that pretty much guarantees that students will take this activity seriously.

2. Make a habit of asking questions about previous material. A few guidelines:

Do not answer the questions yourself. Give a hint if needed.

Ignore their looks of confusion and claims that they don’t have a clue.

No response? Tell them, “that’s the question we’ll start with in our next class and if you don’t have an answer then, it’s a potential exam question for sure.”

3. Have students do short reviews of previous material.

In class today, say, “Let’s all look at our notes from last week. Take 2 minutes to underline 3 things in your notes that you’re going to need to review for the exam.”

Late in the semester, say, “Take 3 minutes to review your notes from a month ago. Do you have anything in those notes that doesn’t make sense to you now?” Encourage them to write more in their notes if they need to.

Students who regularly encounter previous content in your OM course, find studying for cumulative exams easier

Teaching Tip: Class Preparation Assignments (CPAs) in OM

Imagine 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.

Teaching Tip: The Importance of Office Hours

Why is it that so many students don’t take advantage of this opportunity to interact with you? In a recent survey (Faculty Focus, Jan.21, 2015), 66% of students reported that they had not attended office hours for the course in question. The remaining 1/3 had been to the instructor’s office once. Only 8% reported attending office hours more than once a month.

The researchers claim that factors influencing student decisions to use office hours are largely beyond your control (for example, course level, class size, whether the course is required). But instructors set their own office hours. Obviously, on any given day they have other commitments, but still there are discretionary time blocks. And true, instructors usually don’t get to pick their office locations, but that doesn’t mean that’s where the meeting has to take place. Lastly, faculty members most certainly control the kind of feedback offered during office hours.

Perhaps we underestimate the fear factor. Most of us have a hard time imagining how we could provoke fear in a student, but we do. First, we have deep subject matter expertise, and that alone can be intimidating. In addition, we evaluate their work, which they often see as connected to their character. Plus, it’s embarrassing to have to ask for help, especially when the person you’re asking talks about how it’s easy and obvious. And what if the answer leaves you more confused, not less?

The researchers do recommend that faculty “educate” students as to the benefits of office hours. What about topical office hours? Say there’s something a lot of students are struggling with, schedule some office hour time when you’ll work on that topic with individuals, pairs, or small groups. The study also recommends soliciting feedback from students as to the “convenient” scheduling of office hours. Identify 3 or 4 possible times that work with your schedule and see which students prefer. Office hours can occasionally or regularly be convened in other locations.

Although we hold office hours as a way of supporting students, they benefit us as well. That time together helps strengthen our connections with students.

Guest Post: Teaching OM With Mobile Technologies at the U. of Dayton

Dr. Lance Chen, Assistant Professor at the University of Dayton Business School, shares his experience in striving for teaching excellence with mobile technologies.

At University of Dayton, high quality teaching is a foremost performance measure for each faculty member. I teach an introductory OM course, with Jay and Barry’s 11th edition. (Click here to see my U. Dayton Syllabus). We cover 14 Chapters with 25 meetings. To deliver a lecture with clarity with such a limited amount of time, I adopt mobile technology because mobile devices are highly accessible to nearly all the students and the time can be very flexible.

I have thus far created 50 YouTube videos ranging from 2 to 20 minutes to show the re-do of selected book examples and sample homework problems. There are 2 reasons for this: (1) I realize that the course presentation may create some learning gaps between the lecture and the homework problems. These gaps can be fixed by practicing more live examples; and (2) the textbook examples are largely about manual calculations with great detail. However, the learning objective of this course is to let most students stay focused on big picture of OM. Thus, the goal of these video clips is to stimulate student learning activities and to establish the linkage between course contents and practice.

Students love it! More than 80% of students watch all the videos and they seem to be motivated. The peak number of visits happens from 8-11pm. In my opinion, the reason the videos are so popular is that homework seems to be a set of real-world examples and greatly valued in practice. Furthermore, their interactions provide great stimulation. In addition to the active Q&A exchanges during lectures, more students show up during office hours, often with comments on how much they value the videos.

Regardless of their nice words, there are many things that need to be done. First, I try to make every video less than 7 minutes because lengthy videos, just like hour-long presentations, lose students’ attention quickly. Second, I need to add tags with brief description on each video clip that students can use to quickly identify the learning objective.

To me, teaching future executives is not only an honorable profession, but also a creative activity– just like research. I really enjoy it!