The Testing of an Experiential Framework for Teaching System Development Projects Using a Collaborative Project Management Approach

Experiential learning approaches have been especially effective in information systems courses where ‘real-world’ scenarios are used to provide a degree of complexity that reflects actual system development projects. Students are shown how the principles of project management can provide a framework for reducing the difficulty and complexity of the development process to a more manageable procedure as they put into practice their knowledge and skills from previous courework in creating working application systems. This paper outlines an experiential approach for teaching the value of information systems project management in the systems development process through the collaborative efforts of the graduate class in Information Technology Project Management, and the undergraduate senior capstone projects course