TEACHING TEAMWORK AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT USING VIRTUAL PROJECTS

Project management is one of four “management” modules taught in Liverpool science and engineering programmes. One of these modules is taken each year. The module described here is usually taken by second-year students. The problem was: The class typically contains 200-300 students from six or more major disciplines across engineering and science. It is not possible to assume a common set of interests or experiences, as would be the case if the class contained, for instance, only aerospace engineering students. Very few students (perhaps less than ten in a typical year) will have had any experience of project management and many will not have worked or studied in a team. There is usually a diverse range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. For many years the class was taught by lectures only, with no formative assessment and no “active” element at all. Although of course most students passed the exam, they had never used any of the techniques described to them. The solution was: Without changing the intended learning outcomes very much, the material was re-cast into half the original number of lectures, supplemented by a virtual team project with five assessed deliverables at two-week intervals. The key characteristics of the revised module, and its associated virtual projects, are described in more detail in the paper along with feedback from the students who have taken the module.