Academic Paper - Curriculum Development

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a major disruption on education systems and higher education institutions (HEIs) worldwide, affecting more than 1.5 billion learners in more than 170 countries (Marinoni et al. 2020). HEIs have been forced to cease face-to-face teaching and shift to distance teaching and learning, with a few days’ notice, which brought about unprecedented challenges. Therefore, the need to innovate and develop pedagogies and assessment strategies for distance learning was imperative (Pokhrei and Chhetri 2021). In contrast to effective online teaching and learning that is planned and designed from the beginning to be delivered online, the COVID-19 crisis circumstances led to emergency online teaching (Murphy 2020, Hofer et al. 2021, Adedoyin and Soykan 2023). Emergency online teaching refers to the use of online teaching solutions for education that would otherwise be delivered face-to-face (or in a blended mode) and will return to that format as soon as the emergency has diminished. E-learning tools and digital platforms have been vital during this pandemic, assisting HEIs to facilitate emergency online teaching and learning. However, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy, as different students have different needs and different subjects have different requirements and characteristics.

Operations management as a subject is distinctively challenging to teach, but at the same time, it has exceptional potential to provoke students and promote their knowledge (Brandon-Jones et al. 2012). Furthermore, over the past years, the nature of the discipline has changed significantly, shedding light to the necessity of bringing forward digital pedagogic approaches. A glance at the corresponding literature reveals that more applied methods of teaching are suited for operations management. These methods should focus on the application of the subject theory to real-life situations and problems via a variety of different learning methods and techniques. In specific, teaching methods that are recommended to replace or complement traditional lectures are business simulations, experiential teaching methods (such as games), role-plays, group exercises, live cases and virtual reality-aided learning environments (Brandon-Jones et al. 2012, Miyaoka et al. 2018, Tortorella et al. 2021, Hines and Netland 2022). As suggested by the literature, the focus has now shifted from just disseminating established knowledge to teaching the ability to apply this knowledge to real-life problems and situations.

This paper discusses the adaptation of an operations management undergraduate core module, taught to first-year students in semester 2 as part of a generic business management program, from face-to-face delivery to online delivery as a result of emergency online teaching. The main contribution of our paper is that we provide a framework to operations management educators to develop the curriculum for their modules if they need to change from face-to-face to online delivery with immediate effect. This is timely and relevant in cases of teaching disruption due to uncertain and unforeseen circumstances, for example, epidemics, ongoing conflicts, or natural disasters. One of the key components of this module is the use of a web-based simulation game. The innovation in this case is that the simulation game is used in the first year (most papers report that simulation games for teaching operations management are used in the second or third year of studying), whereas this simulation does not focus on a specific operations management area, such as supply chain coordination (Beer Game), production management (Littlefield), or project management (SimProject), but it gives a more holistic overview to students while requiring application of a variety of operations management theories relating to supplier selection, quality management, logistics, demand forecasting, and inventory management. Therefore, an additional minor contribution of our paper is that we present the use of a web-based simulation game featuring a variety of operations management decisions rather than specific areas in the first year of studying, and we provide guidance on administering this.