The Lecturer as a Program Manager: Lessons Learned from Continuously Improving a Project Management Master’s Course for Engineers

This chapter presents the evolution of the Engineering Project Management (EPM) master’s course from 2018 to 2021. The EPM is a project-based learning (PBL) course that aims to close the gap between teaching and the reality of engineering project management practices. The challenges include accommodating both in-depth content and group coaching within the course timeframe, fairly assessing student performance, dealing with the ambiguity and uncertainty intrinsic to open problems and adapting to COVID-19 restrictions and the fully online course setting. To tackle these challenges and achieve the course aim, the pedagogical approaches of individual assessment in PBL, flipped classroom, socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) and peer feedback were gradually incorporated throughout the three years. These redesigns also led to changes in the lecturer’s role, which evolved from content expert and assessor to coach and program manager. Hence, this chapter’s primary objective is to share experiences and support other lectures in the flipping journey of project-based courses. Although the research was conducted in the EPM course context, we understand that this work brings theoretical and practical insights to those intending to design or redesign courses that have a group project as their backbone.