Designing and Delivering a University Course—A Process (or Operations) Management Perspective

With over 30 years of academic experience in both engineering and management faculties, involving trial and error experimentation in teaching as well as reading relevant literature and observing other instructors in action, the author has accumulated a number of ideas, regarding the preparation and delivery of a university course, that should be of interest to other instructors. This should be particularly the case for those individuals who have had little or no teaching experience (e.g. those whose graduate education was recently completed at research-oriented institutions providing little guidance with respect to teaching). A particular perspective is used to convey the ideas, namely one of viewing the preparation and delivery of a course as two major processes that should provide outputs or outcomes that are of value to a number of customers, in particular, students.