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一门还没开始的本科课程的开始
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去年我校毕业的一位德裔学生，移民加拿大前在德国已经获得经济学的本科文凭，在东南亚和加拿大做过多年的资产估价工作。由于各种原因，移民后他选择在我校学习土木工程本科。学习期间，他是他们班上有名的“刺头”，哪位老师的课上得不好，他会在课后给你发来长信，言辞非常尖刻，有时甚至会让老师在课堂上当面下不了台，很是体现了日耳曼民族追求真理，一丝不苟的精神。我在给他上结构分析和项目管理两门本科生课时，与他有过多次交锋，每次我都要认真听取他的批评，他的意见，对我提高教学效果起到了很大的促进作用。这位学生毕业后不久，顺利地在多伦多市的一家咨询公司得到一份工作。
这次备课，我想到了他。于是给他发信，希望他对我们拟订的教学大纲提出批评意见。下面是我们的往来邮件。
我的去信：
Hello ***,
How have you been doing? Are you still working on the Eglinton LRT project?
I
am writing to see if you could help our education at Ryerson. I am
currently developing a new undergraduate course (for third-year, optional)
called “Civil Engineering Systems”. It basically aims to help students
to develop a systems thinking in engineering decisions. One of the
major components of the course is to develop an enhanced capability of
project evaluation that I hope will be beyond the materials that are
learnt in ECN801 （Engineering Economics).
Since you
have the expertise in enterprise valuation and are working now on a large
engineering project, I wonder if you could give me a criticism on the
course syllabus, and whenever possible, give a guest lecture of one or
two hours. The course will be first offered in the Winter of 2012.
I attach
you the course outline, which was developed by three colleagues
including myself. While I am developing the courseware, I become more
uncomfortable with the contents and particularly the breakdown of
lecture hours. I think I need to reduce the hours for OR techniques and increase exposure to basic systems analysis tools, concepts of
sustainability, cost-benefit analysis, and project evaluation
techniques. So what you saw in the attachment represents only a work in
progress.
Thank you very much.
学生收到信后，简短地回复说他非常乐意帮忙，并答应给他几天时间考虑。一周后，他给了下面的回复：
The Eglinton LRT project is long done -- at least for me. I was only responsible for construction staging and traffic management of the launch area at Eglinton Avenue / Black Creek Drive, from which the tunnel boring machines will be launched. But I am working on three other transit projects at the moment. I am doing similar work for the York Spadina subway extension and for the placement of a large water main along Dixie Road. I am also involved in a consortium preparing a bid submission for the "Air Rail Link", which will connect the airport to the GO train network. My responsibility here is project coordination of the design component. There are about half a dozen design firms involved, which creates rather interesting challenges. All in all I am working on a rather interesting portfolio of projects.
About your course outline: It is very ambitious, and I would have certainly enjoyed it. It covers the core aspects of operations research (linear and non-linear programming), network analysis and decision making. But I don't think that most of my class mates would have gotten much out of this course, many of whom were rather bewildered by C programming, numerical methods, statistics, etc. The course outline that you sent me would be more appropriate for a graduate course targeting students with a research focus. (I don't think that undergrad students will often be asked to apply any of the OR methods in practice. But methods to address uncertainty are more likely to be used in the real world.)
So I would agree with you when you write: "I think I need to reduce the hours for OR techniques, whereas increase exposure to basic systems analysis tools, concepts of sustainability, cost-benefit analysis, and project evaluation techniques." It is a bit difficult, however, to go into rational decision making, if the students don't know anything about the Simplex method. But then again, the Simplex method (if memory serves) is essentially a glorified application of Gaussian elimination. In Calculus II or III, we briefly covered Lagrange multipliers, which should make it rather straight-forward to introduce the Kuhn-Tucker conditions. But all this OR stuff should, in my view, only be a tool to get started on decision theory.
When it comes to decision theory, there is a gaping hole in your course outline, i.e. game theory, which I would consider more important for engineering students than all the OR nitty-gritties.
In summary, I would
- shorten the OR component to about 2-3 lectures;
- cover the items that you propose for lectures 10, 11 and 12;
- expand the section on Monte Carlo simulation to ensure that the students get something out of the course that they can apply in practice (the concept of MC simulation was very briefly discussed in CVL316);
- cover the topic in your proposed lecture 4 (sensitivity analysis) and also discuss scenario analysis;
- (optionally) throw in 2 lectures on game theory (using situations relevant to civil engineers);
- cover the topics you suggested yourself: basic systems analysis tools, concepts of sustainability, cost-benefit analysis, and project evaluation techniques.
大家由此也可以看到一位在德国接受了本科经济学教育的学生，他对运筹学的理解深度。当然，这位学生无论在哪，都算是非常好的学生。
科学网上学工程的博主和读者不少，大家对他信中提到的博弈论有什么看法？博弈论对于工科学生，是一个很重要的概念吗？我也期待您的观点！
https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-103568-466350.html
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