Communication in Project Management 

Computer supported education

The conference

On May 25, 2015, a presentation was given on the experiments done in the classroom of Ghent University and University College London using our Project Scheduling Game used in the Project Management couse modules. The presentation was given by Mathieu Wauters at the 7th international conference on computer supported education (CSEDU) conference in Lisbon, a conference that aims at becoming a yearly meeting place for presenting and discussing new educational environments, best practices and case studies on innovative technology-based learning strategies, institutional policies on computer supported education including open and distance education, using computers.

The paper

This presentation reports on results of experiments in the classroom with students following Project Management (PM) courses using a blended learning approach. It discusses the impact of communication on the student performance on business games as well as the advantage of the use of integrative case studies and their impact on the learning experience of these students. While the performance of students is obtained by marking their quantitative output on the business game or case exercise, their learning experience is measured through an analysis of the course evaluations filled out by these students. Diversity among the test population is guaranteed by testing our experiments on a sample of students with a different background, ranging from university students with or without a strong quantitative background but no practical experience, to MBA students at business schools and PM professionals participating in a PM training.

• The paper of this conference entitled "Blended learning in Project Management: Experiences on business games and case studies" written by Mario Vanhoucke and Mathieu Wauters will soon be published in the Proceedings of CSEDU under an ISBN.
• Download a previous article on blended learning in the Journal of Modern Project Management.
• If you can't wait for the conference proceedings, read more about the communication experiments in the free book "The Art of Project Management: A Story about Work and Passion".

The results

The results of the communication experiments can be briefly summarized along the following lines:

1. Timing and sequence of communication is crucial in the learning process of students, and positively contributes to the learning experience and sometimes to the students’ performance.
2. The communication format has a significant impact on the students’ performance, and differs along their practical experience and background. However, no relation could be found between the format and the satisfaction of students during learning.
3. Finally, the student expectations had a major impact on the students’ performance. It was found that students invest more effort and attained better solutions when the importance of reacting to uncertainty was stressed compared to situations in which students were ignorant and therefore did not expect a high degree of uncertainty generated by the computer game.