Teaching and program development

Program development

Since January 2022, I have been the program coordinator for the Operations and Supply Chain Analytics program at the Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University. This program strives to provide a balanced education, combining specialized domain knowledge with general analytical skills. As a result, our graduates are highly versatile and can pursue careers in various fields, including supply chain management, business development, procurement, and data science. The success of the program is evident in the employment rates of our graduates, with many securing jobs even before completing their degrees and consistently experiencing very low unemployment rates.

Although our graduates are in high demand, we continuously strive to adapt the program to ensure our candidates remain highly sought after in the future. This requires constant fine-tuning and updating of courses, topics, and skill sets. Here are some of my thoughts on what will be included in the program moving forward:

1. We will place less emphasis on optimisation theory and more on mathematical modeling. In my view, the ideal outcome of a course on optimisation or prescriptive analytics is for candidates to recognise every decision problem as an opportunity to apply optimization and modeling techniques. Whenever a candidate faces a repetitive decision problem where solutions are not all created equal, they should think "Ah, this could probably be modelled as a X-problem and solved using Y-technology".

2. More focus on performance measurement and performance management. In my view, these are key concepts for a supply chain analyst, and I strongly profess to the saying "what you do not measure, you cannot manage". Hence, our students should have the competences to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of an organisation's actions. This includes the skills to systematically collect, analyse, and report data related to KPIs and other metrics.  Through such analysis, the candidates should be able to identify the relationships between different KPIs. Furthermore, I believe that our candidates should learn how to design monitoring strategies for evaluation of interventions and actions enabling them to answer questions like  "Does the intervention work as intended" and "Have we met our goals using the intervention".

3. The future of supply chain management will heavily focus on sustainable solutions. Therefore, sustainability should be a consistent theme throughout most of our course offerings. This aligns with our emphasis on performance measurement and management, which I believe is essential for systematically achieving a sustainable supply chain. If sustainability is not measured, it cannot be managed. Without efforts to manage aspects like carbon emissions in the supply chain, we risk becoming irrelevant in just a few years.

Formal teaching development

I have complete a number of teaching development courses at Aarhus University's Center for Educational Development (formerly known as Center for Undervisning og Læring). Below I have listed some of them

Course on Online and Blended Learning 

• When: Autumn of 2022

• Focus:  informing and developing the teachers’ use of learning technologies in campus-based teaching. The course was targeted associate and full professors at Aarhus BSS.

• Content: Digital learning technologies, online and blended learning, course design

Master’s and PhD Supervision for Professors and Associate Professors at BSS 

• When: Autumn of 2021 to spring of 2022

• Focus: expanding and consolidating supervision strategies and methods for supervisors of Master's- and PhD students at the Aarhus BSS Graduate School. The course also aimed at furthering the sharing of experiences among university supervisors within their faculty to enhance the co-development of local practices and collegial support.

• Content: Roles, relations and responsibility, writing and feedback, supervisory dialogue, the academic community as a resource in supervision

Teaching Training Program for assistant professors and post.docs

• When: Autumn of 2017

• Focus: university teaching as a knowledge field, learning theory and learning objectives, student motivation and learning strategies, course planning theory, course participants' own teaching plans and practice, different types of lectures, classroom teaching, supervision

• Content: Introduction to university teaching, supervision of Bachelors' and Masters' students, Educational IT, teaching portfolio

Supervision

I have supervised internship reports, project reports, bachelor’s theses, and master’s theses. I enjoy supervising students from several different study programs, as the problems they bring to the table a quite diverse, ranging from e.g. general graph theory problems, to very specific case studies for both Danish and international companies. Once in a while, a student's thesis problem becomes a research problem on its own.

I value a constant development of my supervision skills and I believe I have greatly improved my supervision competences from my encounters with Gitte Wichmann-Hansen, former associate professor at Center for Educational Development, Aarhus university and now owner of the consultancy "Academic Supervision" and Senior Researcher at Department of Education Studies, DPU, Aarhus University. She taught at a teaching training program I followed as an assistant professor and facilitated the course on master's and PhD supervision for associate and full professors at Aarhus University. If in need of sparring regarding supervision, I consider her somewhat of "guru"!

I have supervised more than 30 Bachelor's theses and more than 40 Master's theses. I have also supervised 3 PhD students.

Prices won by my thesis-students

• Oliver Østergaard Madsen has received “Handelsungdommens Uddannelseslegat” for excellent bachelor’s theses

• Anne Katrine Tinggaard has received “Vissing fondens energipris” for excellent master’s theses on energy supply with a focus on the green transition

PhD supervision

I have supervised the following PhD candidates

• Nicolas Forget: Graduated in November 2022 with the thesis "Solution algorithms for multi-objective integer linear programming models".

• Jesper Bang Mikkelsen: Graduating in the autumn of 2024. His research topic is optimal routing of alternative-fuel vehicles.

• Mark Lyngesen: Graduating in the autumn of 2026. His research focuses on multi objective combinatorial optimization.

Courses

I have taught the following courses

• Large scale optimisation (Data science program, Aarhus University)

• Modeling within Prescriptive Analytics (Economics and business administration program, Aarhus University)

  • Lecture notes | code

•  Optimisation for Prescriptive Analytics (Operations and Supply Chain Analytics program, Aarhus University)

• Operations management (Economics and business administration program, Aarhus University)

  • Videos for the online part of the course (Danish)

• Quantitative modelling within transportation and distribution (Economics and business administration program, Aarhus University)

• Topics in Data Analysis (Mathematics and mathematics-economics programs, Aarhus University)

• Modelling and solving discrete optimisation problems within logistics (Summer University course, Aarhus University)