Survey of undergraduate OR courses from IE programme: content, coverage, and gaps

Abstract

An introductory professional course in industrial engineering (IE) on operations research (OR) was initially designed to solve companies’ practical optimisation problems. Research has recently shown that current OR teaching has contradicted the original intention of the curriculum, deviating from the actual needs of enterprises. This paper provides the results of a survey of courses dedicated to the field of OR from IE in Chinese higher education. The study is unique because it represents the first large-scale study of offerings and shortcomings in the OR courses available to undergraduate IE majors. Content analysis was performed on each syllabus to identify course offerings: the pedagogy used, the content emphasised, and the selected assessment techniques. Meanwhile, qualitative and quantitative methods were adopted to investigate the OR needs of enterprises. This aggregated information was used to compare course offerings with the current skills identified as necessary for professional success. These data provide input to analyse the gap between higher education offerings and the needs identified by practitioners. The findings are intended to foster information sharing and provide a data baseline for the development of OR courses in academia, as well as training, development, and recruitment efforts by OR talent in the field of IE.