Video Tutorials Within an Undergraduate Operations Research Course: Student Perception on Their Integration and Creating A Blended Learning Environment

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the impact of video tutorials on an undergraduate operations research (OR) course and analyze important aspects of student perception of their impact on the learning experience. Supplementary video tutorials offer additional examples of OR concepts; thus, class time can be more focused on letting students gain intuition about these concepts. We analyze students’ survey responses to help determine the perceived impact of the video tutorials on office hours and whether students’ familiarity with the creator of the tutorials impacted the tutorials’ effectiveness. Our results demonstrate that students saw significant advantages in using these supplementary video tutorials and that the creator of the tutorials did not impact the tutorials’ effectiveness as long as they were properly integrated into the course. Therefore, our results show that the overhead required to offer online video tutorials may be low (i.e., similar to selecting a course textbook) since their success relies more on proper integration into the course than having the professor of the course produce them. In addition, a preliminary assessment demonstrates that our blended learning environment has a positive impact on the learning experience.