The Lecturer as a Program Manager: Lessons Learned from Continuously Improving a Project Management Master's Course for Engineers

This chapter presents the evolution of the Engineering Project Management (EPM) master's course from 2018 to 2021. The EPM is a project-based learning (PBL) course that aims to close the gap between teaching and the reality of engineering project management practices. The challenges include accommodating both in-depth content and group coaching within the course timeframe, fairly assessing student performance, dealing with the ambiguity and uncertainty intrinsic to open problems and adapting to COVID-19 restrictions and the fully online course setting. To tackle these challenges and achieve the course aim, the pedagogical approaches of individual assessment in PBL, flipped classroom, socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) and peer feedback were gradually incorporated throughout the three years. These redesigns also led to changes in the lecturer's role, which evolved from content expert and assessor to coach and program manager. Hence, this chapter's primary objective is to share experiences and support other lectures in the flipping journey of project-based courses. Although the research was conducted in the EPM course context, we understand that this work brings theoretical and practical insights to those intending to design or redesign courses that have a group project as their backbone. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Guidelines for teaching with ill-structured real-world engineering problems: insights from a redesigned engineering project management course

Real-world design settings can be complex, ill-structured, open and typically uncertain and/or ambiguous about their goals and solution paths. This study contributes to understanding how to work with these types of problems in a course project setting. The main objective of the study is to identify, propose and validate a set of practical guidelines for dealing with ill-structured, open-problem project assignments in courses that teach design engineering or design development planning. A literature review identifies key practices for proposing the guidelines, which are then validated by intervening in an engineering project management master's course. The intervention took place during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions with 12 project groups created from 105 enrolled students. During the validation, qualitative and quantitative feedback was gathered from the students, and the results provide positive evidence for achieving the objective. Key to this outcome was the combination of the self-regulation of learning, co-regulation of learning and socially shared regulation of learning. In this sense, the proposed guidelines look promising for redesigning university courses that deal with open problems, thus enhancing students' capacity for handling uncertainty and ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of European Journal of Engineering Education is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)