Abstract:

Project-Based Learning (PBL) is a popular teaching method because of the effectiveness of PBL to educate a student to become working members of society. However, some issues have been recognized with PBL such as:
(1) some students lack an active attitude or ride on the coattails of their teammates in their PBL team work,
(2) a range of achievement levels among project teams, and
(3) a difficulty to fairly evaluate the grade of each student.

Integrated Scheduling Method (ISM), which uses a project management tool called Deliverables Dependency Matrix (DDM), has been proposed to create a highly feasible project schedule for new product development and the effectiveness of this approach has been reported in an actual product development project. That paper pointed out the possibility to resolve the PBL issues noted above by applying ISM and DDM to PBL. ISM is a process to create a highly feasible project schedule, while DDM is a tool to specify the various conditions of the deliverables. The basic idea of ISM is that the project schedule can be created with the flow of the deliverables passing from one functional organization to the next and the major source of the schedule delay is a return of deliverables caused by various gaps or mismatches in deliverables between the delivery side and the receiving side. Examples include the misunderstanding or ambiguity of the specification, the delivery / receiving conditions, and the planned delivery date / the expected receiving date. ISM and DDM can help create a highly feasible project schedule by filling those gaps. Since DDM can clarify the ownership of the deliverables and the interdependency of deliverables in the whole schedule, DDM can strengthen a sense of responsibility and so create an expectation to solve the PBL issue (1). DDM can help develop the project schedule by reducing the uncertainty of the work which can increase the feasibility of the schedule and the possibility to compress the schedule. The project control arising from the project schedule will resolve the PBL issue (2). DDM also clarifies the contribution of each student to the assigned deliverables in the PBL project, which will resolve the PBL issue (3). DDM is being applied to the actual PBL course in the second semester, 2016, as a trial. This paper provides an overview of ISM and DDM, describes how to apply them to PBL and reports on the preliminary result of the trial.

Keywords:

Project-Based Learning, Project Management, Work Breakdown Structure, Project Scheduling, Product Development.