An Active Project Management Framework for Professional Skills Development

The objective of this paper is to present a framework that is intended to enhance the learning experience of Project Management engineering students. There were more than 150 participants from five engineering disciplines at universities in various locations. They attended project management courses at their own universities, but with a shared virtual experience in executing and managing their projects. Different aspects have been investigated, such as the feasibility of using an integrated and technological framework to help the integrated learning process, the use of Educational Data Mining (EDM) techniques to provide additional feedback of students' performances and forecasting students' successes at an early stage, based on the collected data. In addition, a survey was conducted to assess the students' level of satisfaction and their learning. We concluded that the integrated framework has demonstrated its usefulness in promoting the project management learning process among geographically-dispersed students, even when they come from different engineering disciplines and environmental sciences. Further, an increasing amount of student feedback was received. This impacted the teacher's effort unexpectedly. Finally, specific behaviors were found to be closely related to the student's final score. The main finding is that practical application of immersive frameworks increases student motivation and the outcomes of the course, thereby closing the usual gap between theory and practice.