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Developing and Running a Set of Competitive College/University Blended Courses
A mathematical model underlying a decision support tool letting a college/university administration (a) find a financially optimal composition of teachers to design and run blended courses for its students using fragments of recorded lectures of distinguished professors from world-leading universities, and (b) be competitive in the education market of potential students by offering such designed blended courses, along with corresponding explanations and tutorials, in a new learning environment at affordable tuition fees, is proposed. This model, reflecting the college/university expenses associated with running each such blended course, lets its administration calculate (a) the maximal percentage of the students expected to succeed in studying each course from a set of these courses under a fixed budget, and (b) the minimal budget to secure desirable percentages of the students expected to succeed in studying particular blended courses from this set. The calculation can be done by formulating two Boolean programming problems on the basis of the proposed model and solving them using standard software packages.