Innovative Education: Rethinking O.R. teacher training

By Peter C. Bell

At the recent EURO XXV conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, I learned that another business school operations research/management science/analytics (O.R.) group had been disbanded. This seems incongruous at a time when the demand from business and government for all things analytical is trending strongly upward.

I don’t know the detailed background for this decision, but it reminds us that business schools are demand and customer driven. The business school market is extremely competitive and schools want to charge high fees. Recruiting students at high fees in a competitive market requires a substantial budget for student acquisition (i.e., marketing to prospective students, which involves hiring recruiters, advertising, attending MBA fairs, holding open houses, class and school visits and so on). The more successful and well-known the program and school, the lower the acquisition cost per student and the more financially successful is the program. Schools struggling to recruit students have to decide between paying more to acquire students or reducing internal budgets, with the result that departments with low enrollments or those deemed by school deans to be low contributors to the “marketability” of the institution are vulnerable.

Courses offered in business schools are also customer and demand driven. Courses with low enrollments represent opportunities for the administrators to reallocate resources toward more popular courses. In order to prosper, an O.R. group in a business school must offer popular, well-received courses that meet the needs of the “customer.”

Back to the EURO Conference in Vilnius, where the inaugural IFORS Distinguished Tutorial was presented to a large audience by Dr. Erhan Erkut, rector (president) of Ozyegin University in Istanbul. What was remarkable was the fact that the tutorial was about teaching: “How to Make O.R. the Most Liked Course in the Curriculum.” The size of the audience was also remarkable; I estimated about 400 attendees at a time when presentations about teaching traditionally attract small audiences, and in the EURO program of some 2,000 presentations, there was only one other session devoted to teaching topics. I am hoping, perhaps optimistically, that the IFORS “brand” was partly responsible for the interest and also that this represents a surge of interest in teaching among O.R. academics.

The Importance of Course Marketing

Dr. Erkut’s interesting and animated talk focused on how to deliver a great course and how to develop as an instructor, and his message to “modulate the cognitive load” (that is: mix it up!) is must learning for every instructor. He also mentioned the importance of course design and course marketing (“strategic planning, brand creation and reputation management”). In my view, the latter trumps classroom delivery; it is really easy to deliver a well-designed and marketed course but almost impossible to excite students with a poorly designed course where the purpose and objectives are not well known.

Successful as the plenary lecture was, the format of a large academic conference does not facilitate teacher training, and an hour-long lecture is not the best format to learn how to teach, even if the lecturer is successful at “modulating the cognitive load.” At the annual INFORMS conferences the teaching stream organized by INFORM-Ed has struggled to find a large audience. It appears that those young faculty and doctoral students planning an academic career who could most benefit from teacher training see research as their priority and spend the conference intensely focused on their research.

Courses offered in business schools are customer and demand driven.

Many young prospective faculty members we have interviewed on behalf of the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western University see teaching as a chore (“I’m prepared to teach if necessary, but what excites me is my research”) and consequently don’t progress far in our hiring process. We are looking for faculty who are excited at the prospect of teaching great students and are happy to devote a large chunk of their working time to teaching. Sadly, these folks are hard to find. It is also possible that as the INFORMS analytics certification initiative moves forward the demand for highly capable teachers of analytics will increase, as will the financial opportunities available to highly rated and effective teachers.

The prosperity of academic O.R. groups in the business schools critically depends on the quality of the classroom experiences that these groups deliver, and a growing number of “off the job” opportunities exist for O.R. academics to teach business analytics to an audience that will pay good money for the experience. Perhaps, then, it is time to take a look at how we teach teaching since (as Dr. Erkut pointed out) most actual and potential O.R. academics have never had any formal teacher training.

I participated in last year’s Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium held at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in the fall, which was attended by about a dozen participants, but when we advertise a faculty position we receive scores of applications. How do we persuade Ph.D. students to set their research aside for a moment or two and get really excited at the prospect of learning how to “light up” a room full of students? Much more goes into great teaching than just classroom delivery, and teacher training requires more than serving as a TA or delivering a lecture or two.

The Customer is Always Right

The business world provides a model for teacher training since the teacher and a business have the same objective: to have lots of happy “customers” who will come back for more. Businesses use marketing intensively in pursuit of many happy customers, and teachers have much to learn about marketing to our customers. The first lesson from marketing is to know and understand your customers’ needs and desires. I mentioned the idea of “customers” to a colleague recently and the response was that students are not customers but are much more important than that. I agree but would also point out that our students are not our only “customers.”

Systems theorists (e.g., Checkland, P., “Systems thinking, systems practice,” Wiley, N.Y., N.Y., 1981) talk about the root definition of a human activity system that captures a particular view: root definitions are not right or wrong, just useful. Systems theory says that we can improve our understanding of complex systems by examining them under different root definitions. I recall the example where prisons can be viewed as places to incarcerate offenders or as “universities of crime” leading to very different but potentially useful management implications. I think it is helpful to view our teaching from the perspective of four different root definitions that are derived from four different perspectives on our “customers.”
Our courses should support our home institution (our home institution as “customer”): O.R courses should look state-of-the-art and appealing to key support groups of the institution and should support its mission and pedagogy. At The Ivey School of Business, this means that our courses must be “general manager” focused rather than “specialist” focused, must be primarily case-based and must be “real.”

I recall after publishing my first article in Operations Research many years ago that my dean came into my office and offered his hearty congratulations on such a prestigious publication, but then he did something that had much more influence on my career planning that I have never forgotten. He placed a list of the Ivey School’s advisory board, all CEOs of major companies, on my desk and asked, “Now which of these people should I send your article to?” Prestigious publications are valuable, but prestigious publications that can help your dean market the school to his or her constituency are priceless.

The same applies to teaching: courses and teaching activities that your school’s marketers can talk-up to the outside world are priceless. I suggest that it is difficult to market differences in the coverage of theory; it is hard to argue that including Markov chains in a course rather than queueing theory results in a distinctive course. However, O.R. academics are fortunate in that we can differentiate based on how we teach practice.

For example, I have just required an incoming cohort to read “MoneyBall” (or watch the movie, but the book is preferred) since it provides a good user-friendly introduction to “Competing with Analytics,” which is the title of my core course. Once the course starts we will be examining case after case where firms have successfully competed with analytics. We will also be looking at decisions about managing analytics: How do you start an internal analytics group? How do you preserve your competitive advantage if you outsource your analytics to (say) GENPAC in India, which has 3,000 analysts deployed in client firms? The result is a core O.R. course that covers the basic topics (Excel skills, decision and risk analysis, probability and statistics, simulation and simultaneous decision problems) but is distinctive with its managerial focus.
Our courses should support our faculty colleagues (our faculty colleagues as “customer”): Most business schools offer programs, not a collection of courses. Often these programs are in lock-step with few or no options, consequently the business school teaching faculty function as a team with integration between courses highly valued. Highly valued courses support colleagues’ courses, both those being taught at the same time and future electives. At Ivey, we accept some “service” responsibility (including Excel literacy and probability and statistics) but are aware that if we are seen as too much of a “service course” this will weaken our key position, which is that our materials on their own are essential skills and knowledge for every general manager.

Integration across courses raises two other important issues. First, there are no O.R. problems – we draw our applications from the functions and so the O.R. course can be a leader in integration since we can choose our examples or cases so that we add value to our colleagues’ teaching of the functions. Second, teaching an O.R. course that integrates with these functions requires the O.R. instructor to have functional knowledge. The Ph.D. in O.R. with an MBA is a very rare but highly valuable faculty candidate for a business school.
Our courses should provide our students with marketable skills (recruiters as “customers”): Our courses will gain credibility if the firms that hire our students recognize our course material as valuable. Dr. Erkut’s commented on the value of fostering long-term relationships with the firms that hire our students through class visits and student projects to keep the hiring channel open. When Ivey’s core O.R. course was under threat, we were strongly supported by key recruiters from investment banking and consulting who convinced the program directors that the skills and knowledge we were teaching were highly valued.

What are these skills and knowledge? Our key recruiters find the analytical skills of our graduates immediately useful (many seem to end up as the local Excel expert), but in the longer term they value the ability to take a business issue, define what is important, and then bring their analytical skills to bear to find a great path forward.
Our courses should provide our students with an outstanding classroom experience (students as “customers”): Our courses will prosper if the rooms are full, the students enjoy the courses, and they see value in the materials we are presenting. It is particularly important to focus on core courses that are the primary marketing opportunity for electives – great core course produce high elective enrollments. For some, the classroom is the easiest part of teaching – they are natural classroom “performers.” For others, this takes work and application over a period of time. Practice, videotaping your class, mentoring and watching others in action can all reduce the learning time, but practice, practice, practice seems to be the key.

Most schools use student ratings as a measure of classroom performance. We may not like the way these are collected and summarized, but these are powerful numbers for administrators, often because they are the only hard data that they have. Consequently, learning to “manage” the student ratings process so as to look your best (or perhaps not look your worst) is a skill the teacher needs to acquire.

Growing Appetite for Business Analytics

There is a growing appetite for all levels of business analytics, and many business schools are adapting to meet this demand. The Ivey School has added to its O.R. teaching capability almost every year for the last 10 years. In addition, there are advantages to working in a business school: salaries are generally higher, facilities are usually excellent and major schools offer outstanding internal support (travel and research monies) to faculty, while teaching loads are often on the low side. At many schools, teaching proficiency is a “fence”; new hires who do not reach a minimum standard of teaching do not get to stay, even with outstanding research publications.

Business schools are trying to meet a growing demand for capable O.R. teachers from a job market of Ph.D.s emerging from schools of engineering, operations research or applied mathematics who have a great deal to learn if they are to develop into successful business school teachers. And there is an elephant in the room: Business schools are not averse to hiring “professional teachers” who have no Ph.D., do no research, are often low-cost but are terrific at covering standard materials in the classroom.

O.R. courses in business schools will prosper if they meet the needs of our many customers, but who will teach these courses? If Ph.D.s are to continue to be hired to teach O.R. in business schools, we need to rethink our attitude about teaching and come up with some new ideas on how we teach future faculty how to teach.

Peter C. Bell (pbell@ivey.ca) is a professor of management science at the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western University, vice president of CPMS (the Practice Section of INFORMS), 2012 chair of the Franz Edelman Prize Competition and treasurer of IFORS.