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A Request for Your Ideas
As appeared in the Euro Bulletin
IFORS has a new initiative, a committee addressing improved access to ORMS educational materials worldwide. This committee is being chaired by Vicki Sauter (Vicki.Sauter@umsl.edu) and includes the following individuals:
•Valerie Belton, (val@mansci.strath.ac.uk)
- EURO Representative
• Elise A. Del Rosario (elisear@sanmiguel.com.ph)
- Coordinator Developing Countries Committee
• Hans Ittmann (hittmann@csir.co.za)
- ORSSA Representative
• Susana Mondschein (smondsch@dii.uchile.cl)
- ALIO Representative
• Moshe Sniedovich (m.sniedovich@ms.unimelb.edu.au)
- IFORS Vice President representing APORS
• Yu Wenci (wcyu@se.cuhk.edu.hk)
- Developing Countries Committee Liaison
In addition, we hope to have one North American member representing the INFORM- ED forum of INFORMS.
This effort is not intended to compete with any existing effort, especially not with the INFORM-ED effort in the United States, the tutOR project in Australia, or the effort by people such as Valerie Belton and John Beasley in Europe, and Theo Stewart in South Africa (just to name a few). Rather, the Committee intends to bring together the work of individuals across the world, and build upon their work to provide a value-added contribution.
Right now, we believe the contribution that would add value is to provide search capabilities to make access to already available materials easier to find. We are considering multiple ways of providing search capabilities of existing materials, and will continue to evaluate their effectiveness in meeting the needs of the world-wide community. However, we are also looking at other mechanisms for making a contribution to the community and would be grateful for any ideas that you can provide.
Our current goal is to provide a database of ORMS teaching materials that can be accessed by professors worldwide. Why? Back in the dark ages not so long ago, all professors had access to the primary teaching props of the field: a blackboard and the back of an envelope (or, in more advanced discussions, the napkin). However, times have changed significantly and ORMS faculty today have a wealth of information they can use to present, explain, illustrate and test students on the principles in their classes. Some have developed wonderful simulations, illustrations, bibliographies, cases or other materials that they make available to others for free or for some fee. If a faculty member has found the materials, then he or she can adapt them as appropriate for a particular class.
The materials can be quite useful -- if you can find them. While the Internet overall, and the Web in particular, have reduced some barriers to sharing the wonderful tools some of our colleagues have developed worldwide, its success has created a significant barrier in that it can be difficult to find relevant materials. This is especially true if you seek materials that are written in non-English languages or use examples from Developing Countries. Without a resource for cataloging and searching for the materials, many needs continue to be unfulfilled.
Operationally, we will identify resources that are available and make them easily accessible to users. We will create a database of materials and a mechanism for searching those materials that provides the greatest possible resource to the IFORS membership. This, in turn, means that we must identify the ways in which our users will search the database and ensure that the tool supports that search mechanism.
We have already begun to compile a list of resources, with a crude categorization mechanism at http://www.umsl.edu/~sauter/ifors/. The next two steps will be to augment that list and developing a better way to categorize the materials. At the same time, we are investigating possible search mechanisms -- from available software to
developing our own search procedure.
To get this effort started, the IFORS Education Resources Committee is asking for your help. Please send us information about your secret weapons in teaching ORMS. The Committee needs to know what software you find useful, what cases have been successful, and what demonstrations you use. In fact, we would like you to identify all of the materials you use in your classes for our catalog. If the material is already available on a web site, we would like to know about that web site. If you use a tool or a case or a summary described on a web site, we would like to know about that web site. If you have a particularly useful tool that is never referenced on the Web, we would like to know about them as well. We want to know about it despite where it is found, how it is used or in what language it is written. You can send whatever you have to me at Vicki.Sauter@umsl.edu, or to any of the Committee members identified above. Then watch for more information about the web-based catalog you can use.
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