PM Live

 

Project Management Learning, Intuitive Understanding, and Experience

 

Challenges

Cooperative work in projects has become a dominant form of work in the students' future professional field. Successful project managers are characterized by versatile technical, methodological, social and personal skills. However, the technical and methodological knowledge previously taught in the traditional project management (PM) lecture could not be easily transferred to PM practice. Rather, it was necessary to acquire operational and decision-making skills in order to implement what had been learned. With the help of active learning and interactive methods, the students should try out the concepts, methods and procedures of PM that they had previously learned theoretically, experience the complexity and dynamics of project work and try out alternative approaches.

Goals

The aim was to develop a new concept for the second part of the Quality and Project Management course, which enables the students to actively perform PM tasks adapted to professional reality and thereby acquire realistic experience as a project manager. A further aim was to enable students to engage in individual, self-directed learning and thus prepare for examinations more effectively and efficiently overall by coordinating classroom and e-learning modules in terms of content and didactics.

Results

E-learning modules in the form of e-tests were made available to the students to repeat and deepen the teaching content of the face-to-face course. New task types were implemented to enhance the handling of network diagrams with both the Metra Potential Method (MPM) and the Critical Path Method (CPM), which represent a main focus of the course, as existing task types could not implement this methodology.

A case study was also developed for the practical application of methods, which aimed at the selection, planning and controlling of a mechanical engineering development project. It is made available to the students during the course of the lectures. Through the practical application of the theoretical knowledge, the students' skills are promoted. In the role of project managers, the students analyze and process numerous pieces of information and make appropriate conclusions and decisions. The students are required to work on the tasks using common project management tools (software tools), which builds up additional skills.

Funding

RWTH Aachen University – Blended Learning und Exploratory Teaching Space (ETS)

The Blended Learning and Exploratory Teaching Space is an internal RWTH platform that promotes creative ideas for new types of teaching and learning. The focus is on media-supported teaching.