EC Bus 440 Feedback

[MISin08]

This is perhaps the last of a series of feedbacks I've written about online courses in connection with my Excelsior degree. As I've written elsewhere on the forum, I am taking 12 credits via EC as part of my partnership arrangement through POAG.

Supply Chain is an advanced Operations Mgt topic dealing with the system for delivering products and services to customers; all the parties involved in fulfilling a customer request. Topics include designing distribution networks, forecasting demand, and managing logistics. I've always been fascinated by the subject, plus it has connections to MIS, and so I chose it as an advanced-level business elective. I'm considering graduate work where it may come in handy, as well.

The book is excellent, with a few caveats. It's information dense, the authors are very smart, and the book is obviously derived from their teaching notes for a MBA-level course. At under 500 pages, it's 61% the size of the Heizer/Render text for Operations Management. A lot of what is not included are the colorful pictures, simple diagrams, and easy summaries of the content that make most textbooks easy to read, and the text itself has not been worked over by Pearson's copyeditors to smooth out the authors' personal quirks. For example, where a usual textbook breaks up repetition so that it seems less repetitious, this book repeats itself. Repeatedly. It also has real math in it. This helped in understanding some of the concepts, but we were not tested on math.
There's no handy website with quizzes. Powerpoints would be helpful but they are not provided. I found them for a prior edition on the web, and that helped me get ahead in the reading.

I liked the instructor, despite some funny habits. He has an Army background in Logistics and PhD in management. He thanks people for the dialog. A lot. And ends every email with the tagline "keep the fire!" I don’t think he's a Kenny Loggins fan, I think he's an achiever type, runs marathons (sheesh, earned a MS and PhD while on active duty), is adopting a child in his late 40s. I'm an A student and I worked very hard to keep up. He negotiates quiz grades if you argue the point well.

The class is arranged in 2-week units, 3 chapters per unit. This is a good workload, except that it's very hard to write a solid forum post by Wednesday of the first week; you either have to be ahead in the reading or focus your initial reading just on answering the discussion question, which is not very efficient. Beware, especially if you hate discussion forums: the forum here is worth 20% of the grade. Unit 2 discussion had everyone stumped; the topic was quite broad, where to start? Perhaps because prof is accustomed to being able to order people to do things, when Thursday came and only I had posted, instead of asking people what's up & can he help, he more-or-less ordered us to post. That came off kind of wrong.

The other assignments:
1 quiz per unit, 20 true/false and multiple choice. Easy if you have done the reading. 3 chapters of reading.
Midterm and final, each 75 true/false and multiple choice, also very approachable, though they require a little more thought than the quizzes.
1 paper (your choice of related topic) or spreadsheet analysis of a chapter problem.
1 essay on forecasting and forecast error *or* do one of the book problems and write a professional report on it.
1 paper (your choice of topic from last 4 chapters; 3+ sources).
1 term paper (your choice of topic, 7+ sources).

A nice touch EC provided for this class was a set of videos we could download showing how to format papers for APA. Most courses I've taken have not had media supplements, so that was cool. Prof provided detailed constructive feedback on my writing, something I have not had in years, which I valued. I got an A and I had a blast. Whereas the quantitative methods class was pretty rocky this was completely satisfactory.

Phillip