Virtual Student projects

Christian Steinreiber 2019-01-03 application 0

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If students have a solid base of project management knowledge and have gained initial project experience, project complexity should be increased to get even closer to the day-to-day life of a professional project team.

Projects become more challenging not only with increasing scope, budget and duration, but also with virtual collaboration with students from other countries and / or other disciplines:

The students of the project team do not know each other at first
different language skills
different interests (fundamental question for students of other specializations: do we even need project management?)
Culturally different approaches to project planning and implementation.

Universities need to prepare students for the new globalized challenges, but how can that be integrated into university courses?
Is project experience what all students and lecturers really want?

As part of an Erasmus + Strategic Partnership project, 5 European universities (Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Varazdin, Warsaw, Vienna) developed solutions for virtual student projects.

First of all the problem analysis: What makes virtual student projects of different disciplines a special challenge?

Projects need to be managed, but … this project experience reduces the domain knowledge of the course.
Trust is essential to teamwork, but … how do you develop trust with people you will never meet in person?
Local student teams need to be empowered to feel responsible for the project’s performance, but … how is the lecturer willing to share power, and how are all virtual student groups willing to take responsibility?

The following success factors can be identified:

Success factor 1: Find the right people!

Dedicated lecturers and good preparation needed
Selected students who take care of the coordination and communication
Project owners who know what they can expect from students

Success factor 2: Simplification of the task (less = more)

Success factor 3: Create trust and awareness of cultural differences between stakeholders!

Success factor 4: Create urgency / dependencies! The project is only successful if everyone delivers on time what has been agreed.

Success factor 5: Patience! Be ready to fail the first time. Take the lessons learned and try again!

The most important documents for lecturers developed as part of this Erasmus + project are available under „Download“. This includes a guide (“Teacher Tool”) for the implementation of a virtual international project with the phases:

Step 1: Preparation
Step 2: Implemenetation
Step 3: Assessment and Evaluation

By clicking on the associated process arrows, you will receive more detailed information on the individual process steps of project management.

Additional teaching materials and templates can be found in the download or on the website www.beezr.eu.

Virtual student projects by Christian Steinreiber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://www.beezr.eu/resources/teacher-materials.html.

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