The Expanding Role of Analytics in Operations

In the competitive business world today, every company must keep up with technological advances and, therefore, incorporate data analytics into their operations. Data analytics are a vital aspect of every department in every company. When these analytics are operationalized, or the analytics are automated and applied to the operational side, companies can increase productivity, efficiencies, and customer satisfaction. Through my thesis, I establish how utilization of operational analytics can provide a competitive advantage for a company. I walk through the history of analytics, the different platforms involved in making an analytics process operational, as well as the decisions involved. Along with secondary research, I have interviewed different analytics professionals, gained a certification in Tableau, a data visualization platform, and taken a course to learn the basics of the coding language, Python. The operationalization of data analytics is a unique subject that will grow in importance as the digital world develops

Work In Progress - Virtual Facilitation And Procedural Knowledge Education

Engineering students acquire both conceptual and procedural knowledge as part of their education. While conceptual knowledge, such as understanding why certain design practices are required or having knowledge of the general principles of engineering development, is essential, procedural knowledge to enact specific engineering practices is also needed. This kind of knowledge, such as balancing chemical equations, solving calculus problems, or finding Thevenin-Norton equivalents, is usually taught through rote problem solving, sometimes with the guidance of teaching assistants or aid from the instructor if students find themselves stuck . However, a Virtual Facilitator, designed to help students develop team skills, can also be used to guide students through the solution of specific problems. This Work In Process paper describes the process for developing the needed procedural rules using an example problem from electrical engineering - finding a Thevenin equivalent circuit. © 2011 IEEE

Special Session - Team Training to Promote Constructive (Not Destructive) Conflict

Advancing technology increases the need for engineering students to perform effectively on multidisciplinary teams. While conflict is a normal, and even necessary, component of team dynamics, if not managed effectively it can lead to destructive (rather than constructive) outcomes. An Action Science approach to group and individual effectiveness can help teams handle conflict constructively. This session uses a Teach the Teacher approach to give participants a basic understanding of skills underlying the approach. It provides practice in Action Science through a set of learning modules. These skills can be brought back and integrated into the participants\u27 courses to provide student teams effective ways to handle conflict

Workshop - Building Reflective Team Skills with a T-Group

ABET criteria require that engineering graduates have the ability to function on multidisciplinary teams and communicate effectively . An important component of these skills is the ability to reflect on one\u27s personal actions and the dynamics occurring within the group. This workshop is intended to provide participants with a practical exercise that can help students become more self-reflective and aware of group dynamics, while demonstrating the use of the virtual facilitator system to improve group dialogue. The workshop will engage the participants in a self- directed learning exercise modeled after T-Groups. This exercise will help participants: 1) Become aware of their own patterns of behavior 2) Learn about the impact of their behavior on others 3) Evaluate the impact of others\u27 behavior on one\u27s self 4) Become more effective in interpersonal interactions During the exercise participants may use a computationally intelligent virtual facilitator . It can be used in student exercises or project teams to help students learn communication skills. This workshop will be of interest to engineering educators who desire to incorporate learner-centered approaches to learning but have found that their students need to gain awareness of team dynamics. It will be of particular interest to those open to non-traditional methods

Engaging Virtual Learners: Moving Classroom as Organization Online

The global shift toward online learning and remote work necessitated the transition of a highly experiential course to a virtual environment, challenging the assumption that Classroom-as-Organization (CAO), a teaching methodology designed to foster student engagement, skill development and deep learning, is limited to face-to-face (F2F) delivery. This article explores the process of adapting CAO’s interactive and immersive elements for online platforms, addressing both the challenges and opportunities presented by this transition. By reviewing the CAO literature, which predominantly focuses on F2F applications, we reflect on the complexities of translating such a dynamic pedagogy to online learning and propose potential avenues for future research on the effectiveness of CAO in virtual settings

Work in Progress - Automated Discourse Interventions and Student Teaming

The ability to successfully work in teams is a crucial part of an engineer\u27s workplace success. Engineering education can be improved through a better understanding of how effective teamwork develops. A (patent pending) software tool that listens to team conversations and generates automatic interventions into team discourse can effectively mimic the actions of a skilled facilitator. Automated facilitation tools may help students improve their team skills by providing a simplified model for conversational interventions, which students can readily imitate. This paper describes this tool and presents preliminary findings from student reactions to the tool\u27s use

Petitioning in Boots: Motivation & Mobilization in the Rhetoric of Coxey's Army, 1894

In light of rising unemployment in 1894, a wealthy quarry owner named Jacob Coxey led a band of unemployed marchers from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, DC, to urge Congress to pass two job-creation bills. Coxey spent eight weeks recruiting downtrodden laborers for his “Army,” which marched for thirty-eight days to the nation’s capital to lay their grievances at their representatives’ doorstep. When they arrived, the Army’s protest was silenced, and although their bills never passed, those marchers left their mark on history by engaging in an unprecedented protest. This study examines the rhetoric of Coxey’s Army to understand how it motivated participation in a seemingly impossible feat, especially when it became apparent that the Army’s legislative cause would fail. The Army’s motivational appeals comprised what the current study refers to as the rhetoric of Coxeyism. Distinct from but related to discourses of populism, Coxeyist rhetoric developed the appeal of arguments that emphasize society’s obligation to meet the needs of the middle class, as well as arguments that denigrate other classes to situate them in opposition to the middle class. In turn, Coxeyist rhetoric revealed the motivations behind the so-called “industrial army movement” of 1894, but also behind populism as it reached its apex in the 1890s. Beyond its significance at the time, this dissertation finds that the rhetoric of Coxeyism developed the rhetorical viability of two political traditions that we see still today. First, Coxey’s Army crafted the justifications we accept today that constitute unemployment as a problem of political economy. Coxey’s Army portended the belief that the government should proactively create jobs to alleviate workers’ economic woes. Second, Coxey’s Army heralded marching to Washington to seek redress for grievances as a rhetorically viable form of petitioning, another in a long series of evolutions in that mode of political engagement. That both of these precedents have endured over the decades suggests that scholars of populism, of social protest, and of the rhetoric of the Gilded Age would do well to take the rhetoric of Coxey’s Army seriously

Patterns in Team Communication during a Simulation Game

The development of communication skills is a necessary preparation for effective engineering teamwork. Argyris\u27 Theory of Action provides a framework for understanding patterns in team dialogue. Students can benefit from an awareness of these patterns. The theory highlights the detection and correction of errors by sharing information during group collaboration and interactions. Quality decision-making can be enhanced when members of a team develop high degrees of openness and interdependence. Quality decision-making can be diminished when members of a team regulate the information shared within the team. This work analyzes team interactions from simulation games used in an interdisciplinary engineering course as a team training exercise. Communication patterns of the student teams are selected that model effective and ineffective behaviors. Positive and negative excerpts from actual student interactions are discussed as instructional vehicles for student training on teamwork skills and for guiding student understanding of simulation game dynamics

Toward Good Read-Across Practice (GRAP) guidance.

Grouping of substances and utilizing read-across of data within those groups represents an important data gap filling technique for chemical safety assessments. Categories/analogue groups are typically developed based on structural similarity and, increasingly often, also on mechanistic (biological) similarity. While read-across can play a key role in complying with legislations such as the European REACH regulation, the lack of consensus regarding the extent and type of evidence necessary to support it often hampers its successful application and acceptance by regulatory authorities. Despite a potentially broad user community, expertise is still concentrated across a handful of organizations and individuals. In order to facilitate the effective use of read-across, this document aims to summarize the state-of-the-art, summarizes insights learned from reviewing ECHA published decisions as far as the relative successes/pitfalls surrounding read-across under REACH and compile the relevant activities and guidance documents. Special emphasis is given to the available existing tools and approaches, an analysis of ECHA's published final decisions associated with all levels of compliance checks and testing proposals, the consideration and expression of uncertainty, the use of biological support data and the impact of the ECHA Read-Across Assessment Framework (RAAF) published in 2015