Operations Research Management Science - Innovative Education

<BODY bgcolor="#ffffff" link="cc0000" vlink="cc0000" text="#000000"> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br>   <table border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width=480><tr valign=top> <td width=10><img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 hspace=4 border=0></td> <td width=470> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=2><B><I><A HREF="../../ORMS.shtml" TARGET="_top">OR/MS Today</A> - August 2003</I></B></font><BR> <hr size="1"> <img src="cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br> <font face="times new roman, times"> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=2><B>Innovative Education</B></FONT><br> <IMG SRC="../barbluehook.gif" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="4"><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=8 border=0><br> <FONT SIZE="+2"><B>Up to Standard</B></FONT><BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=2 border=0><br> <FONT SIZE="+1"><I>How should management science faculty respond to the new accreditation guidelines?</I></FONT><BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=2><B>By Thomas A. Grossman</B></FONT><br> <hr size="1"> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=12 border=0><br>    There is an old saying, that those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them. Before I discuss the implications of the 2003 accreditation standards, it is important that we understand the mistakes that led to the widespread decline of OR/MS in business schools in the 1990s. As a profession, we must answer this painful question: "If OR/MS is so important, why could it not stand on its own without the crutch of the AACSB mandate?"<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=12 border=0><br> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=3><B>Why Did OR/MS Struggle to Stand on its Own Merits?</B></FONT><BR> <IMG SRC="../barbluehook.gif" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="4"><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=2 border=0><br> With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear what led to the sudden decline of OR/MS in the 1990s. Living under the shelter of the pre-1991 AACSB mandate, OR/MS instructors had the luxury of teaching with little regard for what students actually did with the material after graduation. Instructors had little incentive to take on the demanding challenge of adapting OR/MS to the genuine needs of technically unsophisticated business students. <P>Indeed, some instructors felt that it was the students' job to adapt to the technical demands of OR/MS rather than the other way around. This attitude is clearly unacceptable today. However, there are historical reasons to think that it once might have been appropriate. This attitude can be traced back to the 1950s, when OR/MS entered the business school curriculum in response to the Carnegie and Ford Reports [Pierson and others, 1959; Gordon and Howell, 1959] that sharply criticized business school teaching and called for more rigor and analytical training in business programs. <P>Given the steadily increasing research expectations of business school faculty, instructors responded rationally to incentives by focusing their intellectual and creative powers on development of their research ideas rather than their teaching ideas. <P>Teaching about the actual usage of OR/MS focused on the activities of technical experts in OR/MS rather than the activities of business graduates. Discussion of OR/MS applications were usually restricted to the activities of OR/MS professionals as described in <I>Interfaces,</I> but without adequate exploration of how business students could create value by devising, selling and managing OR/MS projects. All too often, inadequate consideration was given to the real, hands-on analytical needs of business analysts and managers. <P>The required OR/MS course was often unpopular with the majority of students due to excessive mathematical content and irrelevance to most managerial work. Business school alumni were not personally applying what they learned in the OR/MS course, nor were they using the OR/MS course as a motivator to seek out OR/MS experts. <P>More subtly, faculty in other business school departments were often unsupportive of OR/MS. Part of the reason was a delayed-feedback effect. Many business school faculty earned MBAs before their Ph.D.s, and sometimes had unpleasant memories of their OR/MS course, which they carried with them onto faculty curriculum committees. Business school deans, who are keenly attuned to the opinions of recruiters, the business community and alumni, were getting little positive feedback about the OR/MS course. <P>Thus, OR/MS had limited support from the key constituencies of students, alumni, non-OR/MS faculty and deans. The required business school OR/MS course was often perceived as ineffective or even inappropriate for business students. However, due to the AACSB requirement to teach management science, these perceptions led to little change. <P>When AACSB changed the rules in 1991, the chickens came home to roost. Without support from external constituencies, it did not take long for many business schools to start cutting required OR/MS courses. Top business schools such as Harvard, Stanford, Chicago and Tuck reduced or eliminated required OR/MS courses. Many other schools followed suit. However, OR/MS flourished at some schools where faculty had focused on making OR/MS directly relevant to business students. One bright spot is that many large teaching schools were slow to drop management science and most still retain it.<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=12 border=0><br> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=3><B>What Can Faculty Do to Strengthen OR/MS?</B></FONT><BR> <IMG SRC="../barbluehook.gif" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="4"><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=2 border=0><br> There are several actions faculty can take to enhance the role of OR/MS in their business school. <P><B><I>Provide strategic leadership.</I></B> The accreditation standards have detailed requirements for the creation of the school mission statement, objectives and program learning goals. The standards require the schools to develop these rigorously, train new faculty in them, and use them in the teaching process. Schools will be evaluated on the alignment among these elements and the way resources are deployed, and on the achievement of the learning goals. The mission, objectives and learning goals now have genuine strategic importance to the schools. <P>At many schools, mission statements and program learning objectives are over-ambitious, platitudinous, motherhood-and-apple-pie statements that are widely ignored. I don't have any data on this, but my sense is that mission statements and program learning goals have difficulty competing with internal politics and the teaching preferences of tenured faculty when curriculum and course syllabus decisions are made. At schools where mission and learning goals are important curriculum drivers, faculty will know what they are and refer to them regularly when serving on committees and designing their courses. <P>According to Salvador Aceves, who is leading the accreditation efforts at the University of San Francisco, the action in the next few years is going to be at the level of the school's mission, the associated objectives, the learning goals for the program, and the mechanism to evaluate achievement of learning goals. <P>OR/MS faculty should provide strategic leadership by involving themselves in the creation of these statements. This type of work will have much more importance and influence than in the past. <P><B><I>Get with the program.</I></B> What is your school's mission and objectives? Do you know the learning goals for the programs you teach in? Find out. Then make sure that your course outline contains stated goals and objectives that clearly support them. Finally, deliver what you promise in the outline. <P><B><I>Make your course competitive.</I></B> In contrast to the pre-1991 AACSB standards, management science is not required. Faculty should be aware that the 2003 AACSB accreditation standards indicate that "learning experiences" in management science are "typically" part of the business school curriculum. However, no management science course is required. <P>Thus, faculty need to make their course competitive with other required courses. Instructors should consider adapting the philosophy and content of their teaching to meet real needs as articulated by knowledgeable external constituencies. <P><B><I>Satisfy external constituencies.</I></B> The key external constituencies are students, alumni, non-OR/MS faculty and deans. The onus is on us to teach a course that satisfies them. In essence, we must compete in the marketplace of ideas for our share of student contact time. We must never again fall into the trap of hiding behind an external mandate. <P>The OR/MS course must stand on its own merits, by equipping technically weak business students to be more effective by personally applying OR/MS in their first five years on the job. The traditional focus "Big-Budget OR" must be de-emphasized. If the OR/MS course satisfies the needs of students both when at school and after they become alumni, it will never again need the artificial shelter of accreditation mandates. <P><B><I>Document the benefit of OR/MS to business students and alumni.</I></B> It is vital that faculty be able to make the case that OR/MS is incredibly useful for business students to apply themselves. This is called end-user modeling. The most persuasive evidence for this is when students use OR/MS during their summer jobs, and alumni use OR/MS in the workplace. <P>Faculty should work hard to teach material that their students can genuinely apply, and then work to build a file of success stories. These stories are useful inspiration in class, and provide valuable talking points with administrators and colleagues in other departments. <P>Ask your students to stay in touch. E-mail students when they come back in the fall. Work with your alumni affairs office to reach out and solicit success stories. If you don't get any stories back, then that is clear negative feedback about the usefulness of your course. Make sure you identify this problem before somebody else notices that the OR/MS course isn't delivering value to students. Don't rely on the argument that your course makes students "smarter" or "more mathematical" unless your external constituencies are solidly behind this goal. When you do get stories back, write them up for <I>Interfaces</I> or <I>INFORMS Transactions on Education</I> so that other faculty can assign them to students as readings. <P><B><I>Teach the creation and management of OR projects.</I></B> Here is an unpleasant question: If OR/MS is so darn powerful, why do our practitioners constantly lament how hard it is to explain and sell OR/MS to managers, many of whom took an OR/MS course in business school? Peter Bell of the Ivey School has persuaded me that we need to teach a module on the strategic role of OR/MS, and how they can advance their careers by identifying and managing OR/MS opportunities. <P>Effective deployment of OR/MS by managers requires a great deal of managerial effort. Someone must identify opportunities for an OR/MS consulting project, set out the project goals, communicate the benefits and sell OR/MS inside his firm, work to identify and obtain necessary data, hire or rent OR/MS and software expertise, communicate results, and lead change efforts motivated by the OR/MS project. <P>These activities are of great interest to ambitious business students. Although our leading textbooks currently have little on this topic, <I>INFORMS Case & Teaching Materials</I> has a series of strategic cases that are an effective vehicle for delivering these lessons. Perhaps some of your students will go out and create an OR/MS project after a few years on the job. Having a few letters in your files from alumni who saved millions of dollars because of OR/MS will certainly do you no harm. <P><B><I>Satisfy AACSB guidelines.</I></B> The AACSB standards now have annual reporting requirements and a five-year review. This is much different than the former decade-plus review cycle. Not all of the "learning experiences" in the standard will get their own course, and schools will have to document where they deliver those learning experiences. <P>I recommend that the OR/MS course include many of the learning experiences mentioned in the standard. Document them clearly in your course outline so that your school can point to the OR/MS course as satisfying important accreditation guidelines. <P>For undergraduate business students, the standards suggest that students will "typically have learning experiences" in: communication abilities, ethical understanding and reasoning abilities, analytic skills, use of information technology, multicultural and diversity understanding, and reflective thinking skills. Analytic skills and use of information technology are certainly in every business school OR/MS course. We should probably be teaching communication abilities  for example, how to deliver managerial presentations on the results and insights from an analytic study. There may be ways to integrate ethical understanding and reasoning abilities, reflective thinking skills, and even multicultural and diversity understanding, such as via case studies or exercises that contain modeling or analytic content. <P>For MBA students, the OR/MS course could include content on finance, economics, IT, integrated production of goods, services and information, and perhaps ethical and legal responsibilities. <P><B><I>Do research on practice.</I></B> There is a great deal that we don't know about effective OR/MS practice, whether by expert OR/MS practitioners or by inexpert end-user modelers. This limits the effectiveness of OR/MS in the real world, and it makes it more difficult for us to empower business students to harness the power of OR/MS to advance their careers. <P>Here are some open questions: What are the elements of a successful OR/MS project? How can OR/MS be packaged, communicated and sold in a company? How can business people efficiently create models? What are the building blocks of a model analysis? How can we systematically use a model to articulate insight? What small-scale modeling and analysis opportunities do MBA graduates encounter? What are the principles of effective model communication? What is the role of spreadsheets in OR/MS application? <P>These are all research questions. They are not research questions on algorithms or models, but they are research questions on <I>practice.</I> Our profession needs to understand these issues, so we can take the results and teach them to business students and future OR/MS practitioners. <I>Interfaces</I> is certainly an outlet for such work. However, I often hear concerns that we need a research-oriented outlet to motivate work on these vital topics. A department in a top journal that annually published one or two "Research on Practice" articles would be a powerful signal that our profession is ready to view effective practice as a vital part of our mission. <P><B><I>Maintain qualifications.</I></B> The new standards required schools to document how faculty "maintain their qualifications." This can be done through "learning and pedagogical research," "contributions to practice" and "discipline-based scholarship." It is notable that AACSB now explicitly mentions teaching and practice-related publications. <P>"Learning and pedagogical research" includes publications in <I>INFORMS Transactions on Education,</I> writing teaching cases such as those distributed by <I>INFORMS Case & Teaching Materials,</I> and creating new learning materials and courses. "Contributions to practice" include articles in <I>Interfaces,</I> executive education course creation and documented practice software. "Discipline-based scholarship" includes traditional research activities and publications.<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=12 border=0><br> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=3><B>Conclusions</B></FONT><BR> <IMG SRC="../barbluehook.gif" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="4"><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=2 border=0><br> The inclusion of management science in the new AACSB standards is good news for the profession. It is not a panacea, but it is an opportunity to strengthen OR/MS and make it the best course in the business school. If we use this opportunity to develop and refine teaching materials and philosophies that equip the majority of business students to go out and make a difference in their companies, we will be sure to appear in the next revision of the standards. If we go back to the inward-looking habits of the 1980s, we will have no one but ourselves to blame when we are again eliminated from the standards in 2015.<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=12 border=0><br> <CENTER><TABLE BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="1" BGCOLOR="#990000" width=440> <TR ALIGN="Center" VALIGN="Middle"> <TD><IMG SRC="art/shim.gif" VSPACE=1 BORDER=0 HEIGHT=1 WIDTH=1> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="6" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" width=436> <TR ALIGN="Left" VALIGN="Top"> <TD> <CENTER><font color="#990000" size="3" face="verdana, arial, helvetica"><B>Acknowledgments</B></font></CENTER><BR> <font size="2" face="verdana, arial, helvetica"> The author thanks Associate Dean Salvador Aceves of the University of San Francisco, and Erhan Erkut for their insights. Any errors of omission and commission are the sole responsibility of the author. </TD> </TR> </TABLE> <IMG SRC="art/shim.gif" VSPACE=1 BORDER=0 HEIGHT=1 WIDTH=1> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> </CENTER> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=12 border=0><br> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=3><B>Resources</B></FONT><BR> <IMG SRC="../barbluehook.gif" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="4"><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=2 border=0><br> <OL> <font size=1> <LI> AACSB International: <A HREF="http://www.aacsb.edu" TARGET="_new">www.aacsb.edu</A> <LI> <I>INFORMS Case & Teaching Materials:</I> <A HREF="http://www.informs.org/Pubs/Cases" TARGET="_new">www.informs.org/Pubs/Cases</A> <LI> <I>INFORMS Transactions on Education:</I> <A HREF="http://ite.pubs.informs.org" TARGET="_new">ite.pubs.informs.org</A> <LI> Gordon, R. A. and Howell, J. E., 1959, "Higher Education for Business," New York City: Columbia University Press. <LI> Pierson, F. C. and others, 1959, "The Education of American Businessmen: A Study of University-College Programs in Business Administration," McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.</font> </OL> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br> <IMG SRC="../barbluehook.gif" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="4"><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=2 border=0><br> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=2><I><B>Tom Grossman</B> recently joined the University of San Francisco's Masagung Graduate School of Management, and has taught at the Haskayne and Tuck Schools of Business. He is editor of </I>INFORMS Case & Teaching Materials,<I> past president of the Education Forum and president of the Spreadsheet Productivity Research Interest Group.</i></font><BR>  <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=5 border=0><br>  <img src="../barblue.gif" width=468 height=1 border=0 alt=" "><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=8 border=0><br> <font face="verdana, arial, helvetica" size="1"> <CENTER><script type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script></CENTER><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=8 border=0><br> <LI> <A HREF="tocfr.html" Target="_top"><I>Table of Contents</A><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br> <LI> <A HREF="../../ORMS.shtml" TARGET="_top"><I>OR/MS Today</I> Home Page</A><br>  <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=8 border=0><br> <img src="../barblue.gif" width=468 height=1 border=0 alt=" "><br> <b><i>OR/MS Today</i></b> copyright � 2003 by <A HREF="http://www.informs.org/" target="_new">the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences</a>. 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