INSIDE STORY
I
Welcome to another back-to-school special issue on “Innovative Education.” The lineup of contributors includes familiar names such as Peter Bell of Western University in Ontario, Canada, and Ken Chelst of Wayne State University in Detroit, who have authored several articles for the annual education special issue over the years, as well as first-time contributors such as Jeff Kline, a professor of O.R. at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
Kline, a retired U.S. Navy captain, might be new to the special issue, but his outstanding work in the classroom is well-known in the O.R. teaching community as evidenced by his receiving the 2011 INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice. Kline’s grad students range from Navy ensigns fresh out of the Naval Academy to seasoned admirals receiving executive education on their way to new assignments. Working with highly motivated, dedicated students, Kline’s mission is to put O.R. theory into practice, thus helping officers make tactical, operational and strategic decisions that impact the nation’s security. For more insights on the O.R. grad program at NPS and Kline’s approach to “shaping tomorrow’s problem solvers,” turn to page 26.
Bell, a 2005 recipient of the INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice, reminds us that business school courses are customer- and demand-driven, and that customers (students and the marketplace) are demanding “all things analytical.”
In his provocative article “Rethinking O.R. Teacher Training” (page 20), Bell argues that, given the current demands of students and the marketplace, the time has come to generate new ideas on how to teach future faculty how to teach operations research in a business school environment, and that it would be wise to consider adding a heaping helping of analytics to the mix. Perspectives from four different “customers” anchor Bell’s article. Forget the time-honored phrase “publish or perish.” As Bell’s article makes clear, for O.R. professors, courses and programs in business schools, it’s all about rethinking approaches to teaching and meeting the needs of customers.
Chelst is co-PI of Project MINDSET, a five-year, NSF-funded project to develop and implement a fourth-year high school mathematics curriculum based on O.R. modeling techniques. Previously, Chelst contributed articles that introduced and updated Project MINDSET. This time, he teams up with co-author Thomas Edwards (a professor of mathematics education at Wayne State) to show how Project MINDSET fits nicely into the upcoming “revolution” in K-12 mathematics education. Sparked by the Common Core State Standards Initiative, the revolution Chelst and Edwards describe will produce “an incoming college class that has absorbed the concepts of probabilistic reasoning from a K-12 mathematics curriculum steeped in probability, statistics and data analysis.” For more, see page 34.
Other contributors to this special issue include Deepinder Dhingra and Meena Anantha Padmanabhan of Sigma Mu (“Educating the next generation of data scientists,” page 30), Princeton Professor Warren Powell (“Optimal learning,” page 40) and Karl Reimers and Ellen Jordan of Mount Olive College (“Operational teamwork produces successful capstone experience,” page 44).
Based on these and other educators, the key to the future of O.R. education is and will continue to be innovation.
— Peter Horner, editor
peter.horner@mail.informs.org
