Barriers and Profits Of Distance Education In Operations Research Based Decision Analysis

Distance education and blended learning allow universities to lower costs, have more return on economies of scale, better control educational process and provide higher quality services for students. This process however requires specialized software to be used by a university. The paper tackles issues related with this approach and presents guidelines for construction of a framework for creating web-based education support software in quantitative area – the meta-framework that allows for a rapid construction of web-based educational decision analysis software. The framework design in paper covers three aspect: (1) information system modeling, (2) decision problem modeling and (3) teaching process modeling. The information system modeling includes system architecture, servers, programming languages and technical design. The decision problem modeling provides means to present an abstract decision problem (and more generally - a problem where quantitative methods can be used) and to model interaction between software and decision maker (i.e. a student learning a decision algorithm). Teaching process modeling includes support for linear teaching algorithm in the decision making process, further this can be extended into non-linear and hybrid teaching algorithms. As a proof of concept a working framework prototype named Combine! will be presented. The software’s usefulness was evaluated through a survey carried out on 234 students at Warsaw School of Economics.