Individual Replacement

Individual Replacement

Covid-19 has caused massive disruption to human affairs across the globe – with academia and higher education no exceptions. The majority of universities suspended face to face teaching (either at the outset or later, following a rise in local COVID cases) and adopted online learning. Going forward, university management, staff and students alike are highly interested in how this situation can be best managed to ensure the best possible outcomes for all concerned.

We have already explored this issue informally in the class during a number of interactive sessions. Your task in this report is to comprehensively and rigorously apply the techniques you have learned thus far to structure, make sense of and provide recommendations on this important issue.

As you know, Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a tool which helps decision-makers in a number of important ways. It helps the decision-maker to structure their thinking and identify important criteria. It allows for a compensatory approach, where performance across criteria can be balanced and traded-off. It prompts hard thinking, supports group decision-making and provides a transparent audit trail to accompany recommendations.

Individual Replacement

Your task is to apply MCDA to help decision makers at Strathclyde University decide between the following three options:

1. Return to face-to-face teaching
2. Follow a blended learning teaching approach
3. Follow a fully-online teaching approach

As a guide, your report should include:

• An application of the CAUSE or SUECA problem structuring framework
• A value tree capturing the most important criteria
• Discussion of the approach in the scoring and weighting processes
• Discussion of the overall results (including relevant visualisations from either Excel or VISA)
• A sensitivity analysis of the MCDA
• Recommendations for the decision-makers

To begin, you should consider the perspectives of the following groups of stakeholders:

1. Students
2. Teaching Staff
3. University Management

That is, you should bring in the views of each of these stakeholders in your initial problem structuring through the use of the CAUSE/SUECA framework. However, given that this decision will be made by University Management, your multi-criteria decision analysis (that is your VISA or Excel analysis) should be carried out from their perspective.

To assist you, the results of several post-it sessions carried out recently with groups of students, staff and university management have been included. Participants were asked to brainstorm challenges and issues of concern to them. Please note that this information will likely not capture every issue of concern to each stakeholder group, and further that there may be issues covered that are not of key concern across the entirety of the stakeholder group. As such, whilst you should certainly make use of this information, it is important to interpret it carefully, so as to not “over-infer” from it, and also include your own input in attempting to characterise stakeholder views.

Feel free to select a preferred time point for which to conduct your analysis. That is, you may consider the preparations for the start of this or the upcoming academic year. (Please note that the brainstorming sessions were conducted recently, and whilst many of the points captured will hold true to other time periods, it is worth bearing in mind that not all will necessarily be relevant).

Beyond the list above, there is a great deal of flexibility in terms of the things that might be covered in this report. You will be assessed on the extent to which you apply the methods sensibly and in accordance with the best practice discussed in class, the depth and value of the insights you obtain, and the overall quality of your write-up.

Individual Replacement

Guidelines

• Your submission should be structured as a business report. It should be written in a professional, business appropriate tone. Terminology related to the methods applied can be used, but should not used excessively. The aim should be to ensure the report is accessible to a wide range of potential problem stakeholders.
• The overall length of the report should be no more than 6 pages of A4 – excluding cover sheet, appendices and any references. The report itself should contain the main results and findings (these should not be placed in the appendices). Appendices should be kept to a reasonable length.
• Use font size 11 or 12, and a legible, professional font.
• MCDA models / output can be created using VISA or Excel. Please upload model outputs so that your modelling techniques can be checked.