Lessons Learned from Developing and Operating a Large-Scale Project Course

In 2004, Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden, decided to develop a project-based course for third-year students enrolled in its five-year engineering programmes. The motives were (a) that many of these programmes lacked a project course aimed at developing skills in project planning, teamwork and communication prior to the fifth year master thesis project, and (b) that the introduction of a Bologna framework-style 3+2 education required the introduction of a bachelor thesis project. The project course was offered for the first time in spring 2007.The aim of the paper is to describe the development process of the project course, accountfor the course design, including the intended learning outcomes, the teaching approach andthe assessment schema and to evaluate the experience from running the courses focusingon challenges deriving from the scale of the course, and from assessment of team-basedproject courses. The project course has been carefully evaluated during its first two years. The evaluationresults show that there have been problems with to provide clear and consistent informationto students and staff and to clarify roles and responsibilities. Despite these information issues the students have a highly positive attitude towards the project course. Also the teachers are very satisfied with the quality and conduct of the students project work.The paper was presented at the . It is posted here by permission of the authors.

Proceedings of the 5th International CDIO Conference, Singapore Polytechnic, Singapore, June 7 – 10, 2009