Check out this website: Habits of Highly Effective Teachers

http://www.asee.org/prism/November/html/ten_habits_of_highly_effective.htm

Based on the ideas of the National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI), this is a great Top 10 List for you to have somewhere on your office bulletin board.

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Officer Reports

James Cochran, President

Barry Pasternack, VP External Relations Engineers and INFORM-ed?

Jenny Wagner, VP Meetings

Christopher Zappe, VP Publications Results of the 3^rd Annual Case Competition and Announcement of 4th Annual Case Competition

Pinar Keskinocak, VP Special Projects Proposal for a Summer Workshop in Teaching Management Science and Case and Teaching Materials

Anuj Mehrotra, Combined Colloquia

John Lawrence, Secretary/Treasurer

John Kros, Website Web Flash

Bob Nydick, OR/MS Today Education Column

Mike Racer, Newsletter Editor

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Engineers and INFORM-ED?(from Mike and Barry)

INFORM-ed is a group with a significant number of members from the business schools, but a lesser showing from the engineering schools. What the forum has to offer is certainly of value to all those in academia. We would like to initiate some activities that address this missing link. A few ideas have come to mind:

Now, we want to do more than just bring these to your attention. We need your feedback. If youíre on the engineering side, and you have specific issues, please let either of us know. If youíd like to be involved in one of the above suggestions, again, contact either one of us.

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J.S. McMillan Fisheries Ltd: Optimizing Production Planning by Alexander M. Smith, University of British Columbia; David Glenn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mehmet A. Begen, University of British Columbia; and Martin Puterman, University of British Columbia.

Technology for Transportation Bidding at The Home Depot by Wedad Elmaghraby, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Pinar Keskinocak, Georgia Institute of Technology

The winners of INFORMS Case Competition 2002 were chosen to be Murat Koksalan and F. Sibel Salman for their outstanding case entitled A Case Study of Location, Distribution, and Capacity Expansion Decisions at Anadolu Efes. The winners will receive a $500 cash prize and a plaque for their winning entry. The three runners-up will receive $100 cash prizes and plaques for their distinguished entries.

INFORMS, INFORM-ED, and INFORMS Education Committee thank all those who submitted cases and congratulate each of the finalists. Thanks also to judges Peter Bell, Robert Carraway, Janny Leung, and Norean Radke Sharpe for their time and effort.

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INFORMS 4th Annual Case Competition

INFORM-ED is pleased to continue its co-sponsorship of the Annual Peer-Reviewed Case Competition. This year's competition, as in the past three years, is jointly sponsored by INFORMS Education Committee, INFORMS Case and Teaching Materials Initiative, and INFORM-ED. It is designed to encourage the creation, dissemination, and use of new, unpublished cases in operations research and the management sciences.

All submissions and supporting documentation are due to the coordinator of the competition, Professor Chris Zappe of Bucknell University, by August 15, 2003. All cases will be blind reviewed in August and September by a panel of judges familiar with the case method.

Up to four finalists will be selected and notified by the coordinator no later than September 26, 2003. Finalists will give thirty-minute presentations of their entries at a special open session of the 2003 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. Note that this session is tentatively scheduled for the afternoon of Monday, October 20. The panel of judges will select the winning entry from the finalists based on these presentations. The winner will be announced at the INFORM-ED Business meeting at the 2003 INFORMS Conference.

For more information on this yearís competition, please visit the following: http://education.forum.informs.org//2003CComp.html

A Proposal for establishing an

INFORMS Summer Workshop in Teaching Management Science

Draft 2.2

Steve Powell, Tom Grossman, Andreas Weintraub

March 27, 2003

Executive Summary

We propose that the INFORMS President and Board:

Business school teaching represents an important opportunity for INFORMS to positively influence future users and consumers of management science. While management science thrives at a few business schools, at most it is in decline or has entirely disappeared. An annual summer workshop would help to disseminate effective teaching methods. It would encourage hundreds of new and current teachers to improve their teaching and thereby improve the image of management science in the business community.

A series of three workshops on teaching management science was organized in the summer of 1998-2000 by a few volunteers without significant support from INFORMS. These events were well attended and enthusiastically received. Each was self-financing, breaking even with some support from the home university. Most important, the experience of organizing these recent events provides a base of experience on which to build a permanent workshop series. These events demonstrate that the financial risk to INFORMS of creating this workshop series is very small.

A long-term commitment from the President and the Board is vital to bring out the resources and energy needed to make this idea successful.

The Plan

We envision an INFORMS-sponsored, annual three-day summer workshop on teaching management science. New and current teachers will attend this workshop to acquire the latest tools and techniques and to interact with and form communities of interest with other teachers of management science. We believe that a successful workshop will attract 50-100 attendees every year, with many people returning every few years. Our expectation is that such a workshop would be self-financing after an initial start-up period, since most teaching faculty would participate for a modest honorarium and many of the costs of marketing could be absorbed by current INFORMS activities. (For example, advertisements in INFORMS publications and at INFORMS events do not require significant additional cash outlays.)

Three things are required to achieve this vision:

We propose that INFORMS take responsibility for selecting and contracting for the workshop site (including accommodations for attendees, workshop rooms, projection equipment, meals, and so on), arranging registration and the handling of fees, as well as marketing and promotion. The Academic Director will organize the program, hire and work with the presenters, and interact with participants on the academic content of the workshop. It is essential to delegate the responsibility for the program itself to one person, not to a committee. The Director should be supported by a Board of Advisors, volunteers who can assist and advise the Director on content and personnel issues, but who have no operational authority or responsibility. The Director should report to the INFORMS Vice President for Education.

The Need

Business school education represents a significant opportunity for INFORMS. Business schools are major employers of MS/OR Ph.D.s and business school graduates can become managers who understand, appreciate, and look for opportunities to employ management science. Every undergraduate business student or MBA who experiences a first-rate, relevant management science course is a potential future user of management science and a client for management science consulting. Conversely, every business student who has a negative experience in a management science course represents an important lost opportunity for INFORMS. While some standout management science courses are being taught, management science is in serious decline generally in business schools, to the point where most schools have no distinct management science course at all.

This problem was first recognized by INFORMS in the early 1990s. In 1994, the Presidents of ORSA and TIMS, Dick Larson and Gary Lilien, chartered the INFORMS Business School Education Task Force. The Task Forceís Operating Subcommittee (Jordan, E., L. Lasdon, M. Lenard, J. Moore, S. Powell, and T. Willemain (1997), "OR/MS and MBA's"OR/MS Today, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 36-41, available at http://education.forum.informs.org/magnanti.html) surveyed business school OR/MS instructors and interviewed administrators of top US MBA programs. They found that a prominent cause was a mismatch between traditional OR/MS course topics and the skills demanded by employers. The report recommended significant curriculum changes, suggesting that individual faculty should:

These changes require substantial effort by business school faculty. To facilitate these changes, the Report recommended that INFORMS

While the Task Force focused on MBA programs, undergraduate business programs graduate more students than MBA programs and are an important source of employment for OR/MS faculty. Ammar and Wright provide survey data that shows that OR/MS is now required in less that one third of AACSB accredited undergraduate business schools ("Where is the Beef in Undergraduate Business Education?," OR/MS Today, August 2002, http://www.lionhrtpub.com/orms/orms-8-02/frforum.html). Grossman has offered a diagnosis of the underlying causes of the problem (Grossman, T.A. Jr. (2001), "Causes of the Decline of the Business School Management Science Course," INFORMS Transactions on Education, Vol. 1, No. 2, http://ite.pubs.informs.org/Vol1No2/Grossman/Grossman.php).

One reason for the decline of management science in business schools is poor teaching. Poor teaching of management science in this context can include excessive theoretical content, lack of application to the business problems that graduates will encounter, failure to consider foundational analytical skills, and lack of familiarity with relevant pedagogies. Most MS/OR Ph.D.s receive no training in teaching in the business school context. Many current teachers have limited access to new ideas and techniques.

INFORMS needs to find ways to help new Ph.D.s acquire the skills to teach successfully in the business school context and to help current teachers reinvigorate their teaching with powerful teaching ideas. INFORMS currently offers its members education sessions at the annual conference as well as the Doctoral and Teaching Effectiveness Colloquia before the annual conference. As useful as these programs are, they cannot be expected to lead to systemic change. Change on the scale needed here does not come easily. Many studies of teacher training suggest that substantive change usually does not come about unless teachers are given significant time away from their regular duties, are given new techniques and the opportunity to practice them, and form relationships with instructors and peers that grow into learning communities after the training is over.

Signs of Success

Despite the widespread decline in the salience of management science in business schools, there are a handful of schools at which management science is thriving. At Indiana University, for example, nearly the entire second-year class takes one or more management science electives. At the Tuck School at Dartmouth, the required core course in Decision Science is well received and half the second-year takes a management science elective (Powell, S. G., "Teaching the Art of Modeling to MBAs,"Interfaces, 25:3, May-June,1995, pp. 88-94). Management science has done well at Darden for many years, possibly because of a strong managerial focus in the teaching (Dana Clyman and Robert Carraway, "Managerial Relevance: the key to survival for OR/MS," Interfaces, Vol. 27, No. 6, Nov.-Dec. 1997, pp. 115-130). The University of Western Ontario is perpetually oversubscribed for its management science electives, possibly because of the strong strategic flavor to these courses (Peter Bell, "Positioning the OR/MS core course,"OR/MS Today, Vol. 24, No. 3, June 1997, pp. 8-10). Finally, at Villanova the management science course thrives by requiring every student to perform a significant project using management science in their firm (Matthew Liberatore and Robert Nydick, "Breaking the mold-a new approach to teaching the first MBA course in Management Science,"Interfaces, Vol. 29, No. 4, July-Aug. 1999, pp. 99-116). These are just some examples of schools with strong management science programs.

The schools cited above account for only a small fraction of the undergraduate business and MBA graduates each year. There are hundreds of schools in which management science is taught, if it is taught at all, by a non-specialist who has few resources available other than a textbook. Many of the most successful aspects of teaching management science cannot be communicated well in a textbook. One of the motivations for creating a permanent workshop is to facilitate the transfer of ideas and techniques from successful innovators to the broad mass of teachers.

Experience from TMS 1-3

The original Teaching Management Science workshops were created by a small group of INFORMS members in 1997-98. The first was organized by Steve Powell and offered in the summer of 1998 at the Tuck School at Dartmouth. Peter Bell organized the second workshop in the summer of 1999 at the University of Western Ontario, and Wayne Winston organized the third at Indiana University in 2001. Tom Grossman and Erhan Erkut also provided various forms of support during this period. While the original idea for a series of workshops originated in the Education Committee, and INFORMS did approve a small contingency budget should the workshops fail to breakeven, INFORMS itself played no significant role.

Advertising for the first workshop was placed in Decision Line and OR/MS Today. Sixty-two participants attended the workshop, and several were turned away due to space restrictions. The subject of the first workshop was Teaching Management Science with Spreadsheets. The focus of the second workshop, at the Ivey School at the University of Western Ontario, was on teaching with cases, and had 42 participants. The final workshop, at Indiana University, had no specific topic focus and 26 attended. In addition, 12 to 14 instructors attended each workshop, going to sessions as participants when not instructing in their area of expertise.

Financial arrangements were somewhat different for each workshop. The fee for the first workshop was $695, which was made possible in part by using student dorms for housing. The second workshop was housed in an executive education hotel in Canada, and the fee was $745. The final workshop was also housed in a hotel-like setting, and the fee was $700 (plus an additional cost of $200 for housing).

In each case, the organizer of the workshop funded the start-up costs out of his own budget and paid expenses from participantís fees. All three workshops broke even with the host university providing meeting facilities as in-kind support. Because facilities were provided essentially for free, the risk of offering these conferences was substantially lower than for conferences with long lead time, take-or-pay facility contracts.

What educational opportunities do other societies provide?

The American Society for Engineering Education sponsors an annual National Effective Teaching Institute

NETI Site