February 2001 — Features
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Increasing Productivity in Course Delivery
Coming from a traditional academic background, I was quite skeptical about teaching a quantitative course as an online course. After all, I felt students needed contact with their professors. I have been teaching at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ for 25 years. One of the biggest complaints students would make on course critiques was that the professor was not as accessible as they would have liked. Although students meet with the professor in class for two and one half hours in a face-to-face manner, they feel something is still missing. Given this as a background, I wondered why the powers that be were pushing for the addition of online courses.
When I spoke to my dean, he explained that online courses in our College of Business are not meant to serve as a substitute for traditional courses, but are to be used to supplement our teaching approach. We would be able to reach out to other students who have various difficulties in taking the traditional courses, or to those who would like another approach to learning, or to those who wish to take a course from their workplace or from home. About 75 percent of the student body at William Paterson do not reside on campus. They typically commute from home and work. A goal suggested by our College of Business is to improve teaching effectiveness, and one of the many ways proposed to aid in this endeavor is to include online courses.
About a year ago, I sat in on a presentation that gave an overview of online courses. The idea was quite fascinating. I wondered how effective an online course would be, and whether students would really get out of it the same things that a traditional course could offer. Could one teach an equation online? Could a student understand the concepts involved in forecasting or an inventory model while sitting by his computer? Because the university became more involved in exploring online learning, they began looking for interested faculty. After speaking in more depth to the director of the program, Mr. Peter J. Shapiro, I was impressed with the readiness of the staff to help in any way possible to make this a reality. I felt it was a worthwhile challenge and decided to give it a try.
Deciding to Teach Online
I wanted to offer an online course for Production and Operations Management. This course includes techniques and methods used by management to plan and control manufacturing and other operating systems. Quantitative methods and analytical techniques are stressed for operating system design, productivity, inventory, quality and capacity management. This course meets twice a week, typically during the day, or once a week in the evening. In the summer, it meets four days a week for about two hours. I decided I would offer this course in the summer of 2000.
For the last few years, the university has utilized TopClass to help instructors in the design of their online courses. In brief, TopClass is a course content delivery and learning management system. It provides instructors with the ability to make course materials available on the Web, to gauge students' knowledge and progress, and to enhance communication between students and instructors, as well as among students themselves through the use of discussion lists, a built-in e-mail system, class announcements and various utilities.
