Abstract:

Student´s projects are an important means of tertiary education. With the implementation of the Bologna process, it has become viable to explicitly define the workload and expected outcomes of projects. We present the analysis of students´ projects and of the various ways of integrating projects into the curriculum.

The three relevant parameters for a project are: the result defined in terms of quality, vision and deliverable items; the timeline; and the ressources which correlate with the workload. The size of a project can vary from about 30 to about 1800 hours workload and we present a model and experiences for integrating projects of various size into the curriculum. Typical projects comprise 3 to 5 students and a workload of 20 to 300 hours per student. This can be a dedicated module or an integrated project. The bologna process has enabled to explicitly integrate these projects into the curriculum by means of the module descriptions.

An important aspect of project learning is the project portfolio that allows to cover various aspects of the course subject via the variety of objects and methods in the students´ project. Another aspect is the integration of external customers and stakeholders into the projects. These aspects and also the planning of projects are covered by th Prepared Projects Method (PPM). This method is also used to link stakeholder-oriented projects with the quality requirements of the university and the curricular requirements of the study programme.

Keywords:

Projects, project learning, Bologna, workload, sustainable development.