Transnational Online Project Management Curriculum Model for Engineering Students

The EU Leonardo da Vinci project POOL - Project Organisation OnLine - aims to enhance current practices in project management by adding two new dimensions to the traditional project management approach. The first dimension is the distributed aspect, whilst the second is the transnational, intercultural perspective. For the students this involves not only acquiring certain technical skills but combining these abilities with non-technical knowledge, competencies such as intercultural awareness, presentation skills, online collaboration, project planning and time management knowledge as well as available tools.

In order to achieve the goal, the POOL project is composed of 10 institutions and industry partners from 7 European countries. The main outcome of the POOL project is a curriculum model which integrates the virtual and transnational elements. The development of this model is carried out through a process of refinement and adaptation of the curriculum in two phases: year one comprises a needs analysis and the development of the POOL curriculum model – year two comprises an evaluation of the draft curriculum model in a real-life student project in the field of telecommunications.

The project-based approach in POOL facilitates the practical application of the intended curriculum, to allow the students to develop their competencies in virtual project management tasks through “learning by doing” in a distributed collaborative learning environment.