Emerging Opportunities for Operations Research
in Educational Services

Professor Richard Larson

ABSTRACT

Operations research has increasingly demonstrated its applicability to the services industries including health care, transportation, finance, telecommunications and retailing. But the nation's second largest services industry - education - has not had OR attention commensurate with its size and importance. In this talk Professor Larson will provide a tour of some promising OR modeling and analysis opportunities in the educational sector.

Topics include:
(1) Use of decision analysis and stochastic modeling to create 'virtual patients' in on-line educational web sites for physicians,
(2) Optimally configuring on-line collaborative project teams to maximize learning outcomes;
(3) Configuring software agents as virtual tutors to assist in finding useful educational materials and in correcting homework problems;
(4) Designing learning environments that allow learners to take different paths in a network of educational activities to get to the same desired learning outcome.

Professor Larson is also directing LINC, Learning International Networks Consortium, an international community of practitioners and scholars interested in bringing quality tertiary education to developing countries.  He will describe an effort to use the OCW (MIT Open Course Ware) website of the MIT subject, Urban Operations Research (AKA Logistical and Transportation Planning Methods) to create a global on-line learning community focusing on operations research as it applies to urban operational problems of developing countries.