At a Glance
Institution:
King’s University College
Instructor:
Dr. Felipe F. Rodrigues
Course Name:
Operations Management
Course Material in Use:
Futrell, ABC’s of Relationship Selling Through Service, 7e
Resource in Use:
Practice Operations
Course Type:
Face-to-face (Full online now)
Integration:
Blackboard + Canvas Learning Management Systems
Course Enrollment:
180
The Challenge: Making Operations Management Relatable
In Dr. Felipe Rodrigues’s experience, he has found that Operations Management is a course that most students struggle to relate to, either because they feel like it’s part of engineering, or because they assume it is exclusive to manufacturing, which they are unfamiliar with. He needed a learning solution that would make operations content relatable and therefore easier to learn.
“When I saw Practice Operations, I felt like it presented the closest experience to real life operations that I could provide to my students. It also helps to make the course more fun, competitive, and interactive.”
Implementation
When Practice Operations was first introduced, some of Dr. Rodrigues’s students felt like the modules might be hard to complete. After the tutorial provided by McGraw Hill representatives, however, students felt a lot more comfortable. As the competitive aspect of Practice Operations kicked in, a large portion of the students became very involved and were only satisfied once they received a score of 100.
Often students needed help understanding how each module related to the concepts taught in class. So, Dr. Rodrigues provided examples from Practice Operations during his lectures, which students connected with immediately.
“Connect is very different from other learning platforms that seem outdated and include more rote learning as opposed to the applied learning options in Connect.”
Once students have played Practice Operations, Dr. Rodrigues found that they were better able to understand how hard it is to manage operations and the trade-offs in inventory, balancing an assembly line, or the cost of high service (reputation). Students used their experiences from Practice Operations as the background for their questions and often used situations from the simulation as examples during class participation.
“Practice Operations makes operations management tangible, so it is an ideal tool for experiential earning. Once exposed to it, students get a better sense of the many moving parts of OM and better appreciate the concepts covered.”
Instructor Profile
Dr. Felipe F. Rodrigues is an Assistant Professor in Operations Management at King’s University College, Canada. He holds a Management Science PhD from the Ivey Business School at Western University, specializing in health-care operations and management science. He has published in scientific journals such as Operations Research for Health Care and has presented his research in conferences such as CORS, DSI, ORAHS, and webinars for Simul8®. He is also an experienced instructor in Operations management, Supply Chain Management, Management Science and Analytics.
Recommendations from Professor Rodrigues
“Some of my students devised empirical strategies to complete assignments, so instructors needs to make the linkages between concepts and Practice Operations very explicit. A classic example is job scheduling and priority rules. By telling students to use the shortest time rule or the earliest delivery rule, they immediately realize they have been ignoring or switching priorities and that it hurts their performance.”