Enhancing Excel skills in teaching undergraduate Operations Management

This teaching innovation project aims to enhance Excel skills in teaching an undergraduate operations management course since feedbacks from the Continuous Improvement Assessment Committee (CIAC) of Fairfield University's Dolan School of Business (DSB) and from the DSB Advisory Board indicate that improving basic Excel skills is one of the key areas necessary to close the feedback loop. As a required undergraduate core business course, Operations Management (OM 101) is a good starting point to enhance basic Excel skills along with quantitative analysis and modeling skills in the subject area. In light of overwhelming topics to be covered in OM 101, we enhance basic Excel skills by means of homework assignments with problem-specific Excel instructions, instead of overburdening the students with Excel lectures or commercially available general-purpose Excel instructions.