Teaching Project Management to Graduate Students of Electrical Engineering and Computing

This paper describes the methodological and organizational aspects of teaching on a project management course. A specific feature of the course is its simultaneous offer to graduate students of both electrical engineering and computing. We apply an approach in teaching where students work in a client-oriented project environment that is closely related to their domain of study. The students are grouped in project teams and encouraged to mutually explore and combine project management and technical skills in the simulated project environment. From the organizational point of view, this requires that lecturers constantly monitor multiple domain projects, consult student teams with different backgrounds and cooperate with experts from different domains, including both the academia and industry. Additionally, we explain procedures used to evaluate students' knowledge and work effort. To illustrate different types of student projects, we discuss some of the project results. Using surveys as a research method, we have conducted an extensive research of student work on the projects and on different course aspects. The total number of 348 students that had participated in one of 46 projects has been involved in the series of surveys presented in this paper.