Project objectives

The POOL project aims to enhance existing project management standards and practices in initial university-level education in the field of engineering combining technical skills with soft skills training in a distributed environment. To date technical skills and soft skills have either been taught or trained separately or project training has focussed only on the technical realization and implementation of set tasks. The virtual and transnational elements in this training have rarely been considered at all.

It is assumed that the innovative approach of the POOL project in combining and integrating all these aspects should give curriculum designers the criteria to select the relevant training aspects so that the actual courses reflect and simulate current industry needs. The project results should facilitate and support curriculum design in this field viewing elements both from the academic and industry /real-life angles and giving credit to both.

The primary beneficiaries of this project are thus engineering students whose employability will be raised by comprehensive training that integrates and reflects modern industry practices, especially international project collaboration in distributed settings. The students will be able to acquire key competencies such as virtual group collaboration, working in multinational teams, presenting technical facts both face-to-face and in a virtual environment as well as being familiar with Europe-wide standards of project documentation. Second, even if the project is aimed mainly at university-level education in the engineering sector, the results may nevertheless also be usable in a wider context.

The results may assist any curriculum designer in the compilation of programs for in-house training in the field of distributed project management organised either by companies themselves or educational institutions providing such courses to the industry in the framework of continuing education. Again, while it is primarily the telecommunications engineering sector that is catered for, the results may nevertheless be transferable to any sector that provides virtual project management training for its employees. Furthermore, the handbook provides a reference source identifying key success factors for online transnational project management (training) for companies and any institution implementing such projects. The demand for a reorientation of project management training in the field of initial engineering education is on the one hand clearly documented in the overall EU policy on relevant ICT competencies and on the other hand based on and evident from the dialogue between university and industry partners.

The POOL project aims to achieve the following objectives:

• to provide a curriculum model for integrating practical project work into engineering curricula at university- level education using DE and thus
• to best prepare students to work in multi-skills and multinational teams in a distributed setting
• to filter out and agree on a set of quality criteria for online project management training in university-level education based on current industry practices and taking into account expected future developments
• to compare and evaluate practised national vocational/professional requirements/standards for project organisation and management in a distributed environment using distance education (DE)
• to (re)assess the role of high-level academic education in preparing (engineering) students for professional project and team work
• to (re)evaluate the curriculum development process through the active involvement of and dialogue between university-students-industry
• to use and evaluate DE and electronic communication in skills acquisition and knowledge building