Introduction to Operations Management

Introduction to Operations Management is a great course that gives you a lot of knowledge on how to improve operations in an organization. It introduces the learners to the 4 dimensions of operations performance - Efficiency, Quality, Responsiveness and Variety. Prof Christian Terwiesch is a good teacher. The quizzes and tests help you to learn the concepts well. When I did this course, there were three ways one could do the course - academic track, practitioners track and both tracks together. You had to do both tracks for getting a distinction. For the practitioner track, you had to select a real operations case and apply the concepts learned in the course to improve it. I really enjoyed the course.

Now, after this course became part of the Business Foundations specialization course, the 6 weeks course has been shortened to a 4 weeks course. The first two weeks covers Process analysis. The second week covers Productivity and tools for improving it. The third week covers Quality management. The two modules on Responsiveness and Variety have been dropped from the syllabus after the course was shortened. But the materials for the dropped topics, however, are being made available for the benefit of students. I would highly recommend this course to anyone interested in operations improvement. I really enjoyed this course and never feel like leaving this class. I have been CTA to this course in the last two iterations.

Unlike the other people who have commented on this course, I do not think it was very good overall.

First of all, the audio in the videos was of poor quality. That coupled with an accent and mistakes in the subtitles... it just made the course harder to get through.

Second, while there seems to be some structure to the videos, definitions were given in a somewhat haphazard manner, with different terms and formulas being used without having been declared or clarified upfront when they were first explained by the lecturer. Most explanations via a Google search were consistent with each other, but not the terms and formulas used in the lectures. This made in particular the section on process analysis, the calculation of flow rate, flow time, labour utilization, etc, confusion and immensely tedious. It was a struggle to get through and it made me feel like dropping the unit.

I think I would have done better learning the concepts from a book.

I've loved my other Coursera courses but this one ... Exactly what this guy said:
Unlike the other people who have commented on this course, I do not think it was very good overall.

First of all, the audio in the videos was of poor quality. That coupled with an accent and mistakes in the subtitles... it just made the course harder to get through.

Second, while there seems to be some structure to the videos, definitions were given in a somewhat haphazard manner, with different terms and formulas being used without having been declared or clarified upfront when they were first explained by the lecturer. Most explanations via a Google search were consistent with each other, but not the terms and formulas used in the lectures. This made in particular the section on process analysis, the calculation of flow rate, flow time, labour utilization, etc, confusion and immensely tedious. It was a struggle to get through and it made me feel like dropping the unit.

I think I would have done better learning the concepts from a book.