Group Organized Project Work in Distance Education

Abstract

Project organized problem based learning is a successful concept for on-campus education at Aalborg University. Recently this “Aalborg concept” has been used in networked distance education as well. This paper describes the experiences from two years of Internetmediated project work in a new Master of Information Technology education. The main conclusions are, that the project work is a strong learning motivator, enhancing peer collaboration, for off-campus students as well. However, the concept cannot be directly transferred to off-campus learning. The main reasons are that the students must communicate electronically, and that they are under a fierce time strain, studying part time and typically with a full time job and a family. In this paper, the main problems experienced with group organized project work in distance education are described, and some possible solutions are listed.