A Web-based Support System for Providing Effective Monitoring,

Feedback and Evaluation in Project Management Education

Ana Gonz

alez-Marcos

, Fernando Alba-El

ıas

and Joaqu

ın Ordieres-Mer

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Universidad de La Rioja, c/ Luis de Ulloa 20, 26004 Logro

no, La Rioja, Spain

PMQ Research Group, ETSII, Universidad Polit

ecnica de Madrid, Jos

e Guti

errrez Abascal 2, 28006 Madrid, Spain

Keywords:

Project Management, Distant Learning, Collaborative Learning, Web 2.0.

Abstract:

This work introduces a web-based learning environment to facilitate learning in Project Management. The

proposed web-based support system integrates methodological procedures and information systems, allowing

to promote learning among geographically-dispersed students. Thus, students who are enrolled in different

universities at different locations and attend their own project management courses, share a virtual experience

in executing and managing projects. Speciﬁc support systems were used or developed to automatically collect

information about student activities, making it possible to monitor the progress made on learning and assess

learning performance as established in the deﬁned rubric.

1 INTRODUCTION

Project Management education was traditionally de-

signed according to an expository paradigm that was

accompanied by exercises to directly apply a partic-

ular technique or use a speciﬁc tool. However, exer-

cises or case studies do not provide sufﬁcient stimuli

to foster the level of engagement needed to effectively

facilitate learning (Barron, 2005). The teaching and

learning of project management has grown in inter-

est and popularity recently ((Berggren and Sderlund,

2008), (Ojiako et al., 2011)) and it is well accepted

that new and non-traditional initiatives are required. It

is important to ensure that students move into a higher

order of thinking and learning with the idea of mov-

ing from knowing what to know to knowing how and

why to know (Roger, 2008).

In the process of acquiring the competences re-

quired to become project management professionals,

learners seek to acquire a learning process that pro-

vides them with experiences that are similar to what

they will encounter in the world beyond the class-

room. The ability to work in teams and to communi-

cate effectively is deemed to be an essential skill. This

is particularly important when design team members

are based in differing locations and meet in a virtual

environment (Rooij, 2009).

This paper introduces a new web-based learning

environment that is designed speciﬁcally to facilitate

a structured approach to involve M.Sc. students in

project management and B.Sc. students in project en-

gineering learning processes.

Section 2 presents a brief review on related works.

Section 3 provides an overview of the learning expe-

rience and section 4 is dedicated to describe the web-

based support system designed. Finally, the last sec-

tion discusses some general conclusions and presents

future work.

2 BACKGROUND

There is evidence that teaching Project Management

must be organized in a more learner-centered ap-

proach than classical lectures offer. Several practical

approaches to the teaching of project management can

be found in the literature.

For instance, (Martin, 2000) presents a software

environment for generating customized computer-

based simulations that facilitate project management

education. (Abernethy et al., 2007) describe a spe-

ciﬁc experimental approach for information technol-

ogy students. They argue that project activities must

mirror the real world, if information technology stu-

dents are to learn what needs to be done in indus-

try projects. (Cobo-Benita et al., 2010) proposed a

teaching approach that is based on the learning by do-

ing paradigm to enable students to acquire technical

knowledge and to develop some human skills, such as

254

González-Marcos A., Alba-Elías F. and Ordieres-Meré J..

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

DOI: 10.5220/0004388102540257

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 254-257

ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

conﬂict resolution, complex problem-solving and de-

cision making.

More recently, (Crespo et al., 2011) advocated a

combination of theoretical content, individual applied

tasks, use of software systems and a strategy of learn-

ing by doing in teaching project management. They

formally introduce negotiating and virtual team man-

agement aspects to different teams from different uni-

versities in different locations.

(Mawdesley et al., 2011) focuses on a teaching

module that employs simulation games as the pri-

mary source of instruction in a self-directed learn-

ing exercise. Similar approach has been reported by

(Ordieres-Mer

e et al., 2011) where the gap reductions

between academia and the industry were discussed.

According to the previous non exhaustive

overview there are so many already proposed frame-

work that it is relevant to make clear why one more

framework is required. Authors believe that there is

not a convenient framework allowing to foster the

project management learning process from an struc-

tured point of view, including distant, cooperative

learning and based on evidences and paying attention

to learner’s competence development.

3 COURSE DESCRIPTION

The learning experience presented is based on playing

to manage projects. The main purpose is to move on

from simply learning content by heart to understand-

ing, discussing and sharing in order to learn from ex-

perience.

To reinforce concepts and improve learning by

traditional methods, the simulated scenario involves

the student in the development of a real engineering

project. Thus, the instructors team adopts the role of

a corporation that has decided to embark on the con-

struction of a new facility in accordance with its fea-

sibility studies.

In this study, the program owner, P2ML INC.,

wants to invest in the rising up automotive oriented

nano-coating market. As a part of its strategic plan,

this corporation is considering hiring a company as

provider of basic engineering services for its new

plant. Main representative for the owner into the

project board will be the teachers.

The companies in the program are composed of

students from two different universities, Universidad

Politcnica de Madrid (UPM) and Universidad de La

Rioja (UR). P2ML INC. expects to obtain the tech-

nical documentation necessary to authorize and build

the facility. This includes both documents and digital

content like computer models and systems.

It is expected that students will learn and apply

a methodology that enables them to manage projects

better. As a way to develop their own strategy, they

will learn the project management method (Project

in Controlled Environments: PRINCE2

). This

method is published by The Stationery Ofﬁce (TSO),

is protected by Crown copyright, and is owned by

the Cabinet Ofﬁce of the UK Government Commerce

(OGC) (Ofﬁce Of Government Commerce, 2009).

The use of this method, even for academic purposes is

not new, as it has been frequently reported ((Hewaga-

mage and Hewagamage, 2011) and (Zhang et al.,

2012)).

According to the chosen method a multiphase life-

cycle is accomplished, where meaning for all of them

is learnt during the ﬁrst three weeks of the course. The

general picture of the project life-cycle can be seen at

Figure 1.

Pre-project Initiation Stage

Subsequent delivery

Stage(s)

Final delivery Stage

Executive

Team

Members

Team

Manager

SU: Starting

Up a Project

Directing a Project

Initiating a Project Controlling a Stage Controlling a Stage

Managing Product

Delivery

Managing Product

Delivery

SB SB CP

Figure 1: Project life-cycle: phases and processes.

Although the two main roles, teacher and student,

are still recognizable, they have evolved. Teachers

still have the traditional roles of evaluator and knowl-

edge provider, but now must also assume the follow-

ing roles:

• Owner. To identify his or her interests and to ne-

gotiate various aspects to ensure that her interests

are carried out.

• Auditor. To be responsible for the independent

assessment of speciﬁc aspects of the evaluation in-

dicators and also for any corrective action, if nec-

essary.

For the students learning process, it is necessary to

make clear the difference between the different roles

of persons who work together on the same project,

but with very different responsibilities. In order to do

this, and because students from different locations and

different backgrounds are involved, they are exposed

to different participation experiences by playing three

different roles:

• PM. Project Manager, with management respon-

sibilities. Each project is managed by a team of

seven or eight PM.

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

Education

255

• TMg. Team manager. A PM temporarily assigned

to manage Project Engineers (TM), to produce

what it was described into the Work Package doc-

ument (Managing Products processes).

• TM. Team member, with engineering tasks de-

velopment responsibilities. Each project is com-

posed of seven or eight TM.

In order to promote cross learning process each

learner is requested to invest forty working-hours as

PM and thirty working-hours as TM.

4 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

To facilitate the development of the learning experi-

ence, a set of information systems are used. The de-

signed support system is a web solution based on the

following software tools (Figure 2):

• An Enterprise Program Management Ofﬁce

(ePMO) that provides the necessary project man-

agement tools, as well as some collaborative tools

such as blogs, forums, news, automatic e-mail re-

ports, document repository, etc.

The selected ePMO software was Project.net

(http://www.project.net), which is a well known

Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) soft-

ware. This software facilitates the students use

of the different roles that coexist in the manage-

ment of a project, enabling the team members to

communicate and work together even though they

may be located at distant locations.

• A 360-degree feedback web that contains the de-

signed surveys for collecting numerical assess-

ments about each of the project members regard-

ing their behavioural skills, as well as their team-

working orientation. This makes possible for

learners not only become focused on the technical

aspects of the assigned work, but also pay atten-

tion to other social skills which are keystone for

professional PM.

The designed forms were generated by means

of Limesurvey



(http://www.limesurvey.org), an

open source, PHP-based web application that al-

lows to develop and publish online multi-question

multi-lingual surveys. Moreover, jQuery appli-

cations were developed to communicate the sur-

vey engine with the ePMO software in order to

customize the surveys at runtime by authenticat-

ing the user, automatically providing individual

information once the user has been authenticated

(projects, role, actual phase,...), etc.

• An integration tool (P2ML) speciﬁcally devel-

oped to monitor the operation of the simulation

for each participant, to provide forensic trace-

ability to the assessments, to provide feedback

about the learning progress of each participant,

and to integrate the data collected from the pre-

vious tools to obtain a performance assessment of

each participant.

• A global forum to deal with methodological is-

sues. Learners used to ask colleagues and some-

times the same question ﬁnd different answers. In

order to make it possible to increase the social

knowledge this maintained resource was provided.

• A course management system (CMS), used to de-

liver pieces of knowledge, like lessons, tests, etc.,

as well as to discuss theoretical issues.

Moodle

(https://moodle.org/) was chosen be-

cause it is a free web application which pro-

vides many tools to create effective online learn-

ing sites.

P2ML

Integration Tool

360-degree feedback

web

ePMO

[N]

[BC]

[TW]

...

Global

Forum

CMS

(Moodle)

Web-based support system

Figure 2: Collection of web tools used and created for the

designed support system.

4.1 The P2ML Tool

In order to support teachers in their supervision and

evaluation activities, a new software tool was devel-

oped by means of CakePHP (http://cakephp.org). It

was designed to communicate with the ePMO soft-

ware –as well as the 360-degree feedback web– in or-

der to collect real-time information about project and

team members progress, to monitor the operation of

the simulation for each participant, to provide foren-

sic traceability to the assessments, to provide feed-

back about the learning progress of each participant

automatically, and to integrate the data collected from

the previous tools to obtain a performance assessment

of each participant.

This application allows instructors to make peri-

odic reports to better identify mistakes or inappropri-

CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

256

ate behaviors. In this way, the teachers can more ob-

jectively and efﬁciently monitor and evaluate students

continuously throughout the whole course. Further-

more, to make the most of the information gathered,

the system was built to provide feedback to students

automatically. It checks different analytical errors,

such as links between deliverables and tasks, the re-

lationship between tasks in the project work plan and

many other problems. Thus, when a measurable mis-

take is identiﬁed, an e-mail is sent to all students (PM

or TM) and instructors who are involved.

The presented virtual learning environment stores

a huge number of variables, allowing to perform anal-

ysis that would be helpful to instructors in the design

of adequate activities or identify better learning paths.

5 CONCLUSIONS

This paper has presented a virtual environment that

permits learners and teachers to play around it, mak-

ing possible to learn Project Management techniques.

This learning environment not only include techno-

logical solutions like application servers to manage

learners or gather relevant information, but also in-

cludes operating procedures that highlight method-

ological aspects like phases, relationships between

tasks and work packages, etc.

The web-based support system is useful to pro-

moting the Project Management learning process

among geographically-dispersed students. Also, as it

captures individual actions, makes it possible to ver-

ify inconsistencies in actions and can send alert mes-

sages, a type of feedback, to help learners to improve

their performance, in addition to the regular assess-

ment activities carried out by teachers.

Authors planned to use artiﬁcial intelligence tech-

niques embedded in the support system to shed light

on several matters related to learning processes, such

as the differences in the learning paths that students

follow.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Authors wish to acknowledge Universidad de la Ri-

oja and Universidad Polit

ecnica de Madrid as well as

Gobierno de la Rioja for supporting the work under-

neath this paper. Also thanks are given to the Spanish

Ministerio de Educaci

on, always fostering such kind

of initiatives by means of the Acciones Especiales

program.

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