Tag: Teaching Tips

Teaching Tip: How Hard is it to Make a Good Exam?

One of our biggest responsibilities as OM instructors is making up exams and homework assignments. Do you think your students are too test- and answer-oriented?  When preparing for quizzes and tests, do they focus on memorizing formulas and answers, without really thinking about the questions? Does someone ask during each lecture: “Will this be on the exam?”

To cultivate interest in questions, some instructors consider having students write exam questions. Could this be a way to help teachers generate new test questions?  “Don’t count on it,” writes Professor Maryellen Weimer, author of the Teaching Professor Newsletter. “Writing good test questions — ones that make students think, ones that really ascertain whether they understand the material — is hard work. Given that many students are not particularly strong writers to begin with, they won’t write good test questions automatically. In fact, you probably shouldn’t try the strategy if you aren’t willing to devote some time to developing test writing skills.”

The approach that Jay and I take is to deal with this issue for you. We have created an on-line Test Bank of close to 3,000 AACSB-coded Multiple-choice, True-False, fill-in-the blank, and math-oriented questions to accompany the text. And we have tested and retested these questions to make sure each is crystal clear. In addition, we now have now over 700 homework problems in the text programmed into MyOMLab, our assessment software. Most of these are available in both “bookmatch” (exactly the same as in the text) and “algorithmic” versions (which means that each student solves the same problem, but with a unique data set). If any issue regarding clarity in any one of our resources arises, we will fix the problem on-line the same day.

Making and grading homework and quizzes is probably the least fun part of teaching OM. Our testbanks are there to help you save time for the rest of your teaching tasks.

Guest Post: Four Tips for Teaching Large (and Small) OM Classes

 Our Guest post today comes from two experts in the science of teaching. Wilbert McKeachie,  Professor Emeritus at University of Michigan, has served as President of both the American Psychological Assoc. and the American Assoc. for Higher Education. Marilla Svinicki is a Professor at University of Texas-Austin.

Many of us who teach today are being tasked with doing more with less. This can reach to the classroom and result in larger sections as more students are allowed to enroll in each. Large classes are also nothing new for many first- or second-year survey or pre-major courses in business schools. No matter the reason for the larger class size, students may exhibit a tendency to hold back their responses — or their attention — in a large lecture hall. Thus, to combat a tendency towards passivity among students, it’s vital to have a strategy for keeping them actively engaged during each class session.

In our book McKeachie’s Teaching Tips (2011), we offer a number of suggestions for maintaining student interest, involvement, and attention:

• Invite faculty members or student teams to debate relevant topics during class. This interchange of ideas offers students an opportunity to practice their listening and critical-thinking skills in a lively setting.
• Conduct an interview with another colleague or outside expert who can present a different perspective on the material you’re addressing.
• Assign a student presentation. In addition to encouraging independent thinking and individual motivation, the activity can also enable students to learn from one another and gain valuable experience working as part of a team.
• If time is too tight for each individual student to present, consider a “poster session.” Working in groups, students conduct research on a given topic, and then present their findings . Students stand by the posters in shifts, ready to answer questions about their work, while also taking time to circulate and review their peers’ posters.

Though you probably won’t substitute all your lectures for these activities, they can certainly serve to break up a sense of routine — and keep students on their toes!

MyOMLab: Getting Ready for the Fall Semester–Some Tips

As we start this new semester, Jay and I would like to welcome new and returning faculty and the 15,000 new students who will be using MyOMLab this Fall. This is really wonderful software that we have spent many, many hours developing to make student assessment,  homework and exams easy for you as the instructor and enjoyable for your students. Our publisher has also made a great package of tools available to help you use the system and we encourage you to try them out.

  Interactive User Guides: Our searchable user guides offer step-by-step instructions and links to training tutorial videos, so you can read how to do something and then watch it being done! The guide also includes a “first day of class” form to distribute to students to help them sign on.

LIVE WebEx Training Sessions: Attend a MyOMLab training session. These are intimate virtual training sessions led by experienced users who can offer you advice. Click “Show All Meetings” to see the complete list of available sessions. There is a session almost every day that will meet your needs.

MyOMLab in New Design
Read about the latest version of MyOMLab and what it means to you. This is created by our Customer Experience Manager, Matthew Dorsey (matthew.dorsey@pearson.com).  Matt is available to help you get started this Fall. He understands all of the nuances of MyOMLab.

Tech Support:
1-888-433-8435
Monday through Friday,
8 AM to 8 PM (ET)

Your Local Pearson Sales Representative:

(Not sure who it is?)  You can search by school here: http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/replocator/. Your rep will even come to your classes the 1st week to help get everyone started.

And please feel free to contact us at jheizer@omniglobal.com or brender@cfl.rr.com. Our marketing manager, Jami, also welcomes your call or email: jami.minard@pearson.com.

Teaching Tip: Planning for Next Semester

As you wrap up one semester and look forward to a much-deserved winter holiday, it’s also time to think ahead to the next term. Here are just a few thoughts that summarize some of the blogs we have posted this semester:

1. Try to build some videos into the class schedule. They make a nice 10 minutes break and can lead to lively discussions. Jay and I have created 31 videos with short cases. They range from ambulance, boat, and potato chip manufacturers, to Hard Rock, Olive Garden, and Arnold Palmer Hospital.

2. Take MyOMLab for a test run if you haven’t used it as a testing/homework/assessment tool yet. We promise it will save you 10 hours a week in grading time, while raising the average GPA of students in your class almost a whole point. Just email Anne Fahlgren at anne.fahlgren@pearson.com for a personal on-line tour. An earlier blog has more  MyOMLab details as well.

3. If you are teaching a very large OM class, check out Phillip Flamm’s Guest Post on how he handles his classes at Texas Tech. Its useful and entertaining!

4. If you would like to try a few in-class exercises, scroll through some of the Teaching Tips we have posted. My favorite is a 10 minute quality control “game”   which makes a good point about inspection vs. sampling.

5. As you probably know, we provide 2 great software packages for solving homework problems–Excel OM and POM for Windows–free to students. I have found that students value these programs even long after they graduate. A Guest Post by Howard Weiss, who developed both packages, may be helpful.

6. Try out a guest speaker or two. Students seem to respond very positively to “experts”.

7. Finally, we encourage you to bring current news items about OM into your class. To help, we will be posting 3-4 OM in the News blogs every week.

 

Guest Post: Teaching Quality Control with Olive Garden Breadsticks

Here is a great Chapter 6 teaching tip that is sure to make you popular with students – especially if you offer some extra credit.  Send them on a “breadstick quality control” mission.  A number of years ago, I helped the Olive Garden Restaurant chain solve an important problem.  Their breadsticks were inconsistent.  They were varying colors, sizes and shapes.  The breadsticks are a signature item for Olive Garden, so management needed to define the extent of the problem, and to change the quality control.

I will not go into the whole process of solving the problem, but I will tell you that I began by visiting Olive Gardens and observing the breadsticks, even measuring them and recording variations in color and shape.  There was no doubt about it, there was a striking inconsistency, indicating a quality control issue.  After working with their bakeries, and finding a problem in the production chain, the restaurants once again had a delicious, high quality, consistant product.

Are the breadsticks at the Olive Gardens still consistent?  Why not send teams of students to dinner and ask them to record their observations.  With today’s technology, they can even take pictures of “problem breadsticks” and share them with the class. You can also discuss these 3 questions with the class:

  1. Why are breadsticks such an important item in the Olive Gardens?
  2. What are other examples of signature items in restaurants or other businesses?
  3. Before you visit the restaurants to do a quality control survey, what equipment do you need, and what exactly will you be looking for?

    4. 

Prof. Bill Quain currently teaches at Stockton College in NJ. He previously held endowed professorships at the U. of Central Florida and at Florida International U.

Guest Post: Trials and Tribulations of Teaching OM in Large Sections At Texas Tech

Teaching any subject in large sections (100 to 300 students) is difficult, but teaching operations management with heavy doses of quantitative/procedural type material presents a lot of unique challenges. In a large lecture hall students are farther away from the professor and as a result don’t feel comfortable asking questions and seem to be a bit less engaged than in smaller settings. The trick is to make the large room seem smaller and the lecture more interesting. Many may not want to admit this, but teaching in this setting requires more entertainment value to keep the students engaged.

Over the years I’ve used a combination of tactics that seem to be effective. Five minutes before class begins I play rock videos on the video screen with volume turned up to a high level. It energizes me and wakes up the students. When class starts I show a short funny video (1 minute or so) to help the students relax. As I lecture I move around a lot (back and forth and up and down the aisles) utilizing exaggerated arm/hand movements. I don’t use a microphone since I have a big voice, but I do talk louder than my normal speaking voice with more variation in speed of delivery and voice inflection. The idea is to make you seem larger and the room seem smaller.

During the lecture I sprinkle in operations management examples from my career with a little self-deprecating humor added. Some of the examples have definite entertainment value, but examples seem to foster understanding and I ask questions on exams based on those examples. I also utilize the Turning Technologies personal response system “clickers” (I’ll discuss my experience with PRS in the next blog). Use of the PRS system (in Power Point form) has three distinct advantages:

  1. Refocuses the students’ attention (4 to 5 questions per lecture)
  2. Allows for collaborative learning
  3. Reinforces key points that may be exam questions (if students don’t get the correct answer I back track to bolster understanding).

PRS responses may also be utilized as an additional assessment tool for accreditation justification or for research purposes.  In short, variation seems to keep students engaged and at a point where they can retain more.

Phillip Flamm is an Instructor in the Information Systems and Quantitative Sciences department of the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University

Teaching Tip:Using Software to Solve Homework Problems

 

          When I look back at 35 years of textbook writing, I sometimes think that my biggest contribution to OM pedagogy was writing the early versions of AB:POM.  These were the PC programs that allow students to solve about 95% of the homework problems in the text.  I remember coding them in BASIC, in 1980 on my Apple 2e.  Thank goodness for Professor Howard Weiss at Temple U., who had the skill to bring about the upgrade to POM for Windows (and then to create Excel OM) a decade or so later. 

          I usually spend a half hour demonstrating how to use these programs, free to students, the first week of class.  They pick up on the inputs easily and are very happy to avoid doing regressions, SPC, and inventory modeling by hand.  I know some profs don’t use software in their course, but my view has always been to stress output interpretation, rather than hand calculations.

          Students have called me years later to tell me they still find the software useful in their jobs. 

          Which one to use, POM or Excel OM?  I used to show both and let the students pick their favorite.  But later I decided to focus on Excel OM, the Excel add-in.  Its open coding shows the formula and looks like the spreadsheets they are used to.  Any homework problems with an X next to it can be solved in Excel OM, and any with a P by POM (which is written in C++).

Teaching Tip: Using Guest Lecturers

Sure it can hurt your self-esteem when teaching evaluations are turned in and several students comment that “the most valuable part of the course” was the guest speakers!  Somehow, executives who visit our classes are viewed as having more expertise then we have.  I guess its only human nature; just like elementary school kids who believe what a teacher tells them more than what their parents say.  I can’t tell you how many times my sons have said I was dead wrong when I helped with their math homework (despite my 3 degrees in math related fields).

          But it is true that guest speakers, when carefully selected, checked out, and given a 45 -50 minutes schedule, can enhance a class.  One of my colleagues at Rollins College has said he has no time for guests in his class. “There is just too much material to cover,” he says.  I disagree.

          Over the years I developed a cadre of 6 -8 excellent guest lecturers.  One is the Frito-Lay VP-Operations for Florida (who always brings a huge box of chips – the students devour them as if they have never eaten before).  One is from Darden (who generously gives out $5 gift cards to Red Lobster and/or Olive Garden).  Another is former CEO of Tupperware, who tells the story of a $90 million OM decision that went very bad.  My favorite speaker while teaching at Rollins was the late Philip Crosby, the well-known author and quality guru.  He never missed a semester and lectured to scores of my classes.  It turns out that even famous people are more than honored to come and lecture in a college.

          Get to know your speakers first, ask to see any Power Points they intend to use for your quick review/input, and thank them every semester with a gift that has the college name on it.