آموزش مدیریت عملیات در قالب یکپارچه: برداشت دانشجو و تجربه اعضای هیات علمی

Understanding the role of the operations function is an important part of any business student's training. Here we present and analyze our experience of teaching operations management by integrating it with other business disciplines. A survey instrument was developed and students were asked to complete the online survey at the beginning and at end of the semester. Statistical analysis was performed on the responses received. Using factor analysis and structural equation model we assessed student perceptions. We found that students perceive learning operations management in an integrated format quite useful. Students are well trained to understand the interrelationship of operations management with other business functions. The experience and viewpoints of faculty members developing and delivering the integrated course over a significant period are presented as well.

Through the years, most business schools have delivered core courses in a silo approach—especially management, finance, marketing, and operations management. As a result, business schools have traditionally turned out narrowly focused graduates who are often unaware of how decision making by one functional area affects or is constrained by decisions made by other functional areas. For example, many graduates fail to see how finished goods inventory, while desirable by marketing in order to meet demand from available stock, may prevent operations personnel from producing goods and services that can be competitive in terms of features or pricing. They also fail to see how this inventory can show up on the income statement as something that directly affects bottom-line profitability. This, of course, is just one example of how the silo approach to teaching can lead graduates to miss the big picture of business management. In order to address the above problem, faculty at our institution developed a course that focuses on ‘business’ instead of ‘discipline’. The integrated course is over a decade old and is constantly evolving based on student feedback as well as feedback from recruiters and other external constituents. The course is regarded as a competitive advantage by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business as well as by Business Week in its 2006 ranking of comprehensive undergraduate business schools. Business Week singled out our program for its course in which student groups prepare business plans ( Lavelle et al., 2006). We use the business plan development exercise as a tool to foster student learning of the interdisciplinary nature of real-world business and were glad to receive acclaims from external entities for doing so. Nonetheless, we felt that an objective review of the current offering would be useful. We, the operations management faculty, particularly focused on our discipline in the context of the integrated learning environment. The purpose of this research is to assess student perception of teaching operations management by integrating it with other disciplines and to analyze the experience of the faculty teaching the integrated course. The following two sections review literature regarding such courses and detail how faculty at our institution deliver the operations management course in an integrated format. This is followed by discussion of the current study's research questions and methodology. Finally, discussions on results are presented followed by concluding remarks.

The main objective of this research is to assess student perception of teaching operations management by integrating it with other disciplines and to analyze the rich experience accumulated by the faculty while developing and delivering the integrated course over a number of years. Student perceptions on usefulness of operations management, effectiveness of current COB 300 course structure, and need for modifying current course structure were evaluated using SEM. Our initial hypotheses about the inter-relationships among these three constructs were validated. After analyzing the survey results, we can conclude that students found the core course in operations management to be useful and teaching operations management within the integrated structure of COB 300 to be quite effective in facilitating students’ learning. Overall, no significant need for modifying the current course structure emerged from the study. Finally, it was found that students were better equipped to understand the interrelationship of operations management with other business functions after the course was taught. The viewpoints of the faculty members from all four disciplines involved in the integrated course were also presented. We described various aspects of the course including advantages, disadvantages, and challenges of offering the course in an integrated format, lessons learned from past experience, and suggestions for other schools thinking of moving in this direction. The rich experience obtained from developing and delivering the integrated course at our institution for over a decade would definitely be a very useful source of information. The academicians can use the findings from this research for developing and delivering courses in an integrated format. Since the undergraduate students lack the ability to see the big picture of interrelationships among various business functions, an integrated course structure similar to the one presented here enhances the learning process. Prior to taking a business core course, students may have some idea of management, marketing, accounting, and finance. But not many students are familiar with operations management. Hence, it is even more important to establish the connection of operations management with other business disciplines. If students are required to develop a business plan, it provides ample opportunity for them to reflect upon the topics learned in the individual disciplines and apply them in a coherent fashion in cross-disciplinary business-like settings. Whenever possible, providing students with such hands-on experience is quite beneficial to their long-term professional success. The paper also provides a comprehensive framework that can be adopted to evaluate usefulness of an instructional approach using a student survey. Student perception on different aspects of an instructional approach can be measured using carefully structured questionnaires and the inter-relationship among various types of perception can be assessed by developing SEM. It may be a good idea to gather student responses both at the beginning and end of semester and study the change in response patterns using statistical analysis. Besides student opinion, student performance should also be captured to establish the effectiveness of the adopted teaching method. We would like to point out few limitations of our study. We do not have information on student perception and performance if operations management is taught as a stand-alone course. It would be interesting to see if student responses are significantly different between stand-alone and integrated teaching formats. However, in the current setup at our institution, it is not possible to gather such information. A follow-up study can be conducted in the future to assess differences between the two scenarios. It would also be interesting to thoroughly analyze how students value such an integrated course offering after they graduate and work for a few years. Gathering detailed information on recruiters’ perception of the integrated format may provide some insight as well. Acknowledgements We would like to thank our colleagues at James Madison University (JMU) for sharing their experiences in developing and delivering the integrated functional systems course. Special thanks goes to Dr. Claire Bolfing, Mr. Bob Eliason, Dr. Wilson Liu, Dr. Charles White, Dr. Ken Williamson and Mr. Tom Wood for taking time to respond to our queries. We also thank the students at JMU who participated in the surveys. We are grateful to Dr. Peter Kelle and anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions that have improved the quality of our paper.