Abstract:

The paper focuses on applied and target-oriented strategies for teaching an Applied IT course for a dedicated MA specialization on Project Management, during the academic years 2022-2023 and 2023-2024. We adopted a goal-oriented approach in delivering the course, focusing on IT tools and basic knowledge for project design and management.

The course covers IT management knowledge for project design, as well as IT tools for project management – MS Project and dedicated Excel applications. All topics have specific practical tasks, such as designing IT strategies for different types of organizations, case studies on IT and information system implementations, web site analysis, modelling and managing a project in MS Project and practicing Excel facilities for project management, with dedicated applications like: consortium syntheses on partners and tasks or computing man-hours and budgets for each task or resource.

We briefly overview the course characteristics. For the student feed-back analysis, we used the data provided by the official UBB teacher evaluation tool, which is included in our university’s academic information system AcademicInfo. The course educational materials were prepared on the faculty’s moodle e-learning platform. The course was also broadcasted online, using MS Teams (which was also used during the online teaching period).

We constantly revealed the IT aspects which are important for project management, like using IT management knowledge in IT project design, proper calendar design and resource involvement, performing a web site analysis and applying these skills for project sites, as well as appropriately using MS Project for project design, management and monitoring and dedicated Excel applications for necessary syntheses and other computations.

We also analyze the students’ final grades and discuss students’ results, as well as the benefits of the bonuses we introduced for student active involvement in the course activities.

Using UBB’s teacher evaluation tool, students graded the course with an average of 4.74 in the academic year 2023-2024, compared to 4.38 in the academic year 2022-2023, very good scores on a scale 1-5, where 1 is very poor and 5 is very good. Students expressed a general positive feed-back towards the course content, the acquired knowledge and mainly the usefulness of the practical assignments they have worked on, all these aspects leading to an overall very good rating of the course.

Keywords:

Goal-oriented learning, interactive learning, practical assignments, MA IT course, project management, student feed-back, IT tools, MS Project, educational impact.