Staff Development and Teaching and Learning Resources Project / Struggling to find an identity

Staff Development and Teaching and Learning Resources Project by Helen MacGillivray: The LTSN Maths, Stats & OR Network has been successful in a bid to the funding councils to fund a year long project, with a summary description of “Improving the staff development opportunities for HE teachers in Mathematics, Statistics and Operational Research (MSOR) through the provision of new discipline-based resources and support that will increase their effectiveness as teachers thus enhancing the learning experiences of students”. The full bid document may be found at http://ltsn.mathstore.ac.uk/bids/staffdev.PDF…/... Struggling to find an identity by Andrew Tobias::What is it about Operational Research? Nobody outside the subject seems to have heard of it. And try to describe what you do to anyone at a dinner party and you quickly realise you took the wrong degree course. Yes, fellow Operational Researchers, we’re in a real mess. But why, and what shall we do about it? The problem is not new by any means. No less than the Operational Research Society itself has even held competitions amongst its membership to arrive at an agreed definition - each time without success. And in the Universities, the situation is far from helped by the current ‘System’. Specialisation seems increasingly to be the watchword, and for all the rhetoric about the importance of cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research (whatever the difference might be) you try to fit research that is truly broad into the neat subject-specific categories of a research assessment exercise. Everyone knows a trouble-shooter when they see one, but not so a problem-solver…