IE 4516 · Quality Assurance

Course Overview

Course: IE 4516 — Quality Assurance (Undergraduate) Role: Graduate Teaching Assistant to Prof. Hugh McManus, and lead on the redesign of the course teaching materials, with Prof. McManus and Dr. Rehab Ali Institution: Northeastern University, Dept. of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering Term: Fall 2023 (Prof. Hugh McManus, ~20 students)

Quality Assurance covers statistical process control, design of experiments, measurement systems, sampling, and the management systems that surround them. It is a course where students can pass every calculation and still not understand what the numbers are for.

Course development

This is the course where I moved from delivering material to building it.

I took the lead on a complete redesign of the course teaching materials, working with Prof. Hugh McManus and Dr. Rehab Ali, restructuring them around experimental, simulation-based, and project-based learning. I redesigned and taught the Design of Experiments and ANOVA module, including a classroom game built for it, and revised and taught the Process Control module. Rather than present quality methods and then ask students to practise them, the redesigned materials put students inside a process first — running it, measuring it, watching it drift — so that the statistical tools arrive as answers to a problem they have already felt.

What that meant in practice:

• Replacing lecture content with activities students work through themselves. The material students previously received passively became something they generated.
• Simulation and hands-on experiments as the entry point to control charts and process variation, so the distinction between common-cause and special-cause variation is observed rather than defined.
• Project-based assessment, so the course ends in something students have built and can explain, rather than a set of exercises.

I then taught several of the resulting modules myself, which is what turned the redesign from a document into evidence — I saw where the new materials worked and where they needed another pass.

Why this shaped how I teach

Designing a course and teaching it are the same job. You cannot run an active classroom on materials built for a passive one — the materials either create the space for students to work, or they quietly close it. Every course I have designed since, including OR 6205, started from that lesson.

It is also where my interest in curriculum development as scholarship began: the questions of how students build practical judgment, and how a course can be structured to develop it, are the same questions I now want to research.