The Effectiveness of a Lifecycle Approach to Learning Project Management

Abstract

This paper is based on an ongoing research project. Its main purpose is to demonstrate the effectiveness of adopting the project lifecycle approach to learning Project Management through an interactive multimedia system. This multimedia system, referred to as the interactive tool (or the tool) in the paper, is a flash based environment. It can be accessed from either the local storage device of a computer or the Internet under both Microsoft and Apple based operating systems. The tool follows the standard lifecycle phases of a project in teaching fundamentals of Project Management at the undergraduate level. In order to demonstrate its learning effectiveness, the tool was put to the test at three different universities in Australia, Japan and Canada. All the participants were taking Project Management as part of their studies. This combination provided the opportunity of studying participants from different learning, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The test consisted of a specially designed workshop with customisations for each country. The main objective was to measure and gauge the learning outcome in each case. The findings confirmed that all the participants from every group achieved two main goals of learning the field; and enjoying the learning process.