Track: Operations Management

Abstract

An approach to course planning in educational programs was presented in Madan and Gnanendran (2020). There, each student’s journey through a degree program was viewed as a “project” requiring completion of a set of tasks (courses) with each task having a specific duration (semester) and, possibly, precedence requirements (prerequisites).  The institution is expected to offer courses in an appropriate sequence and timing so that students may progress toward graduation efficiently. Given the large number of students that could matriculate every semester, the institution needs to manage myriad individual degree pathways. To make this problem tractable, Madan and Gnanendran (2020) considered cohorts of students, rather than individuals, according to when each entered the program. The institution then only needs to manage a limited number of simultaneous projects with outcomes that are measured on the typical criteria of time and cost.

Recently, researchers (e.g. Rigby et. al., 2016) have espoused the “agile” approach over the traditional “waterfall” approach to managing projects in environments where changes to requirements are to be expected, the work can be modularized, and there are avenues to collaborate with end-users. Since degree programs possess all of these characteristics, we propose heuristics based on agile methodology to address course planning and demonstrate their application via numerical examples.

Keywords

Project Management, Multi-Project Scheduling, Agile, Heuristics, Course Planning