Operational research aims to explain the phenomena of operating systems scientifically and to use this knowledge to engineer solutions to problems arising in the operations of these systems. Therefore, books, courses, and curricula introducing O.R. should treat this full spectrum of knowledge and activity, especially the involvement with real systems. In particular, undergraduate training programs, currently biased in the direction of models and methods, need to achieve a proper balance of theory and clinical experience, and to experiment to determine what this balance should be and how to achieve it. This paper reports one such experiment: An introductory undergraduate course given at the beginning of the second year that centres much of its attention on actual experience with real operating systems.
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Hugh J. Miser (1976) studied this question.