Learning by doing in project management: Acquiring skills through a collaborative model

Abstract

This paper presents a teaching approach for an undergraduate course of project management under the learning by doing paradigm. The course experience as a whole is presented, including planning aspects for all scheduled activities, are provided later. The definition of the project is provided, as well as its specific details for practical project work, the main educative instrument of the course, in order to bring out the most relevant aspects of the approach. These include improving the learning process by means of a collaborative model and details of the assessment process that make continuous improvement possible. Detailed research to evaluate the effect of students' previous work experience of this learning model is also considered in this paper.

A Web-based Support System for Providing Effective Monitoring, Feedback and Evaluation in Project Management Education

“…They argue that project activities must mirror the real world, if information technology students are to learn what needs to be done in industry projects. (Cobo-Benita et al, 2010) proposed a teaching approach that is based on the learning by doing paradigm to enable students to acquire technical knowledge and to develop some human skills, such as conflict resolution, complex problem-solving and decision making.…”

An improved way for evaluating competences: A different approach to project management learning

“…The length of the course itself is very limited, just 4.8 ECTS (european credit transfer system), which imposes restrictions [5][9], on the dedication of both instructors and students. All these characteristics produces a quite challenging experience from different points of view and only a few of competences are being assessed, but, in any case, the model for competences of project managers is being considered as adequate.…”

“…A search in the literature shows that the researchers have even found interesting the analyses for estimating the effort of both students and instructors in a competitive collaborative environment based into the PjBL strategy [5]. Moreover, specific software tools have been proposed for formalizing the cooperation between teams not located at the same place [6].…”