Tag: Videos

Teaching Tip: Unleashing the Power of Active OM Learning

The key to educational success in online OM education lies in the integration of active learning strategies, writes Faculty Focus (Aug. 9, 2023).  Consider the following recommendations to better engage students in online or hybrid learning environments:

Collaborative tools such as virtual whiteboards and group projects. Whiteboards enable students to brainstorm ideas and collaborate to solve problems, draw diagrams, and illustrate operations processes. Group projects serve as powerful vehicles for promoting collaboration and teamwork skills. Groups allow them to engage in shared decision-making, divide tasks, and collaborate on a common OM project.

Interactive activities. We have many interactive activities in our text that can help keep students engaged and motivated in online learning. Take our five MyLab simulations (details how to use them in this 9 minute video): inventory (Ch. 12), quality (Ch. 6), project management (Ch. 3), forecasting (Ch. 4), and supply chains (Ch. 11). Students can manipulate variables, observe outcomes, and analyze data, all within a controlled digital environment. Simulations are particularly beneficial for OM decisions, allowing students to gain hands-on experience and develop critical thinking skills.

Quizzing tools are effective in reinforcing key concepts and assessing student understanding. You can create online quizzes with multiple-choice, true/false, or fill-in-the-blank questions using platforms such as Kahoot!, Quizizz, or Google Forms. These tools often offer features like timed quizzes, leaderboards, and instant feedback, creating a gamified experience that motivates students to actively participate and strive for improvement.

Feedback mechanisms play a crucial role in the learning process. Our MyLab homework system provides instant feedback on whether a student’s answer is correct or incorrect, along with an explanation or hints to guide their understanding.

Opportunities for reflection. Reflection is an important part of active learning, as it allows students to think critically about what they’ve learned and how they can apply it. Writing assignments provide a platform for students to express their ideas and insights. For instance, after completing an OM in the News reading or watching a lecture, students can be assigned reflective essays where they critically analyze the content, connect it to real-world examples, and express their own perspectives.

Multimedia content. Our 50+ company video case studies can be used to engage students and help them visualize real-world concepts. These videos not only make the content more relatable and engaging but also enable students to observe that which cannot be shown in a classroom setting.

By using these tools, we think you can create a dynamic and engaging online learning environment for your students.

Teaching Tip: How to Deliver a More Exciting OM Lecture

When preparing a slide presentation for an OM  lecture, we’re not always thinking about the most compelling way to deliver it, says Harvard’s Faculty Lounge (Sept. 13, 2022). We load up our slides, and then sometimes read them aloud to our students.

But no one—especially a student—is wired to engage with bullet points on a slide. They’re wired for story, a narrative that has a theme, attention-grabbing moments, and a satisfying conclusion. On their own, presentation programs like PowerPoint or Google Slides are not storytelling tools. So we need to be the inspiring narrators.

Understanding the difference between presenting and storytelling is critical to our ability to engage students and stir their excitement. Here are 4 strategies to help grab your students’ attention and ensure they are retaining what you’re teaching.

1. Craft a narrative that brings the topic to life. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using PowerPoints for classroom learning, but slides shouldn’t be designed to replace the instructor—the storyteller. The narrative must come first, and slides should complement the story.  First identify a story that brings the topic to life and then create or select the slides. It can be a consulting experience, a blog from this site, a WSJ article, or a case study.

2. Animate your story with pictures or videos. Students recall only 10% of the content they hear. But if you add a picture, they’ll retain 65%. So use one of our 50+videos, a YouTube clip, graphics, or photos to help bring the stories to life.

3. Add a few surprises. Some PowerPoints are boring because they’re predictable. Your students know what comes next—another slide of bullet points, followed by another. A good story, however, has the element of surprise. The human brain pays attention to novelty—twists and turns and unexpected events. This means your students will perk up when they detect something that breaks a pattern.

4. Rehearse the story before sharing with your class. A great lecture should inform, inspire, engage, and entertain, and should therefore be rehearsed–out loud. While it’s not realistic or necessary to practice every minute of a 1-hour lecture, at least rehearse the opening, conclusion, and stories you plan to share. Students won’t recall every piece of information they heard in class, but they’ll remember the moments you choose to spotlight.

We all strive make our OM course topics compelling–and we are lucky that ours is a field that allows us to bring teaching to life.

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

lance chenDr. 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!

MyOMLab: Three New Features for Fall

myomlabJay and I have been working away for the past 6 months on three new features that you may want to incorporate into your use of MyOMLab this fall. We hope they add to the depth of choices you already have and you are able to make use of them.

1.  All new conceptual questions: Why is this important? Operations Management is both a quantitative and qualitative course. We have always had amazing resources for the quantitative aspects of the course in MyOMLab, and now we are beefing up our qualitative coverage. These questions are located right in the assignment manager, so instructors can assign them just like they would any other assignment, and they can integrate them into assignments with quantitative questions as well.

2.  New OM in the News section and assignments: This includes hand-picked articles from our blog that show how OM is used in the real world. A summary (300-400 words) of current articles from BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fortune, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal (along with hyperlinks) are provided for each chapter. There are 4 multiple choice questions that go along with the articles, and you can assign them from the assignment manager.

3.  All new video assignments: One of the hallmark features of our text has always been the videos we have created (35 of them, including the 5 brand new Orlando Magic series that just came out) to accompany the books. Now, you can assign the videos along with 4-5 multiple choice questions to test understanding right within MyOMLab.

In addition, we wanted to let you know that 92% of the End of Chapter material is now in MyOMLab: Our OM texts already had more problems and assignments than any other book on the market. Now, that choice is reflected in MyOMLab.

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.