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I have been teaching the course MGMT 3100 Management of Service Operations at Leeds School of Business in the last two years. The course is an undergraduate elective for junior and senior business majors. For Fall 2013, I offered three sections with total enrollment of 91 students. Most students in my course major in Operations Management and Information Systems, even though I also have about 15 students from other areas, including Marketing, Management, Accounting, and Finance. One component of the course is writing a case report for a Harvard Business School case titled “Delays at Logan Airport.” Students are asked to analyze the airplane arrival delays using Queueing (waiting lines) principles and summarize the findings in a 5-page report. This is a group assignment for groups of about three students. This course component is challenging for students both because of the analysis and the report writing. For most students, this will be the first time they write a case report at Leeds. For Fall 2012, when I offered the course for the first time, I received mixed feedback from students on the case report component. Many students pointed to the challenge of analyzing a complex case and writing a case report for the first time. While many students sought help from me, I was only able to help them when they came to my office. A few student groups only came to me a day or two before the case report was due, at which point it was too late to correct the erroneous analysis or revamp the writing. I adopted supervised case writing in Fall 2013. I expected students to work on the case report in late November. The plan was to monitor progress of student groups over time and give them timely feedback. Since most of my students used Google docs to edit their case reports, I asked students to share their work-in-progress documents with me in Google drive. My goal was to enhance student learning and to improve the quality of the case report submissions.

The Logan Airport case concerns Logan Airport in Boston. The airport has three runways under normal operating conditions. However, under severe weather conditions, only one or two runways are operational, dramatically reducing the operational capacity for handling airplane arrivals and departures. When there is insufficient runway capacity, airplanes need to wait for take-off and landing, which are costly for both airlines and passengers. The proposed solutions include building a new runway and peak-period pricing (PPP).  The advantages and potential issues of each solution are discussed in the case. In order to write the report, students need to first analyze the case using waiting lines principles, where airport runways are modeled as servers in a queueing system. The case analysis can be challenging because most students in the class have little experience analyzing business cases. They are also new to waiting lines theory. The pedagogical goals are two-fold. First, students analyze a real business problem (airport delays) using a new tool covered in the course, waiting lines analysis. Second, students learn how to write a case report, which is modeled after consulting reports. Students need to summarize background information and their analysis at a high level. They also need to communicate their main findings and recommended actions in an executive summary. The overall objective of supervised case report writing is to give students more guidance on the case analysis and on the report. On Tuesday, November 12, 2013, I posted the case assignment online and also made announcement in class. Students were asked to write a 5-page case report, which was due on Thursday, November 21st. However, to accommodate the workload of some students before they left for Thanksgiving break, the due date was extended to Thursday, December 5th. The case assignment given to students includes detailed instructions on the structure of the case report. It also contains a set of discussion questions to guide the analysis. An Excel spreadsheet was distributed to students to help with Waiting Lines analysis. I included in the instructions a request to share the preliminary draft of case reports with me on Google Drive. The following paragraph is included in the case assignment:

Each group is encouraged to make appointments with the instructor to discuss the case. Groups are also encouraged to share their preliminary reports with the instructor for comments and feedback. If Google Docs is used to edit the report, please share the document with user dazh1150@colorado.edu. First names of all group members should be included in the filename so that I can distinguish among groups.

Within a week of giving out the assignment, I started to receive links to shared documents on Google Drive. As the due date for the report approached, I started to receive more requests. Several teams chose to share their reports as soon as they started to work on it, while others waited until they had a decent draft. Not all teams chose to share documents on Google Drive; I also received a few hard copy draft reports from students. Overall, 10 out of 24 groups shared working drafts with me either on Google Drive or in hard copies. As soon as I received the shared reports in Google Drive, I started to comment on students’ work using the comment functions. For hard copy drafts I received, I commented by hand and sent back scanned documents of the commented version. In general, students were quite responsive to my comments. I received email notifications as the comments were resolved. I also communicated with many student groups by email regarding my comments. Interestingly, many students also chose to share their analysis in spreadsheets with me on Google Drive, even though it was not requested in my case assignment instruction. I checked the shared spreadsheets as they came in and commented on them as well. It turned out that most groups made some mistakes in their analysis and were able to correct them after receiving my comments.

The Outcome

It would be interesting to know how my approach affected student learning outcome. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to directly measure the impact on student learning. I did notice, however, that student groups who shared their preliminary drafts with me produced much better case reports. Almost all student groups that received my comments made some changes to their reports before submission. Addressing my comments did seem to improve the reports. Overall, I think the reports I received were in better quality than the ones from the previous year. There is an argument on whether using a new tool --- Google Drive -- is completely necessary. Indeed, students who shared their hardcopy preliminary drafts also benefited from my comments and were able to produce higher quality drafts as well. Is the positive learning outcome a result of the use of technology or the fact that students were able to receive some timely feedback on their work? I would probably attribute the success more to the latter, even though I would point out that sharing the documents via Google Drive did make the process of giving comments easier -- no document printing and scanning and more timely feedback. Overall, I observed significant quality differences between reports from student groups that shared their preliminary drafts and those that didn’t. It is probably true that student groups who shared the drafts tended to be more dedicated to the course. Student groups that shared the documents with me also performed better, in aggregate, in other aspects of the course.

Lessons Learned

I view the project a great success that significantly enhanced student learning. I am likely to continue implementation of this project in the future, both in Management of Service Operations course and other similar courses. There are several opportunities for further improvement to my project. First, I feel that I can implement the project in a more structured way. In particular, I think it would be much better for students to share completed initial drafts with me. Sharing a document that is practically empty does not give an opportunity to give helpful comments. I would also impose some timeline (say, at least two days before the due date) on document sharing in future implementation. This would give an opportunity for me to comment as well as for students to improve their writings. A last minute document sharing is simply not helpful. Finally, I would like to encourage participation from all students. There was some evidence that document sharing was mostly done by students who were more dedicated to the course. I would consider making document sharing a requirement in future semesters.