Many higher education institutions across the world are forced to move to blended learning. As a leader in blended learning in higher education, Eiffel Corp is providing free resources and online support through our series of webinars.

Let us help you develop your skills, improve understanding of these tools and implement them effectively.

This is a recap of our webinar on, “Digital Course Development Project Management” Below are some questions asked during the session, with our answers. The webinar recording can be found at the end of the questions.

Question 1: Firstly, thank you to all the participants, presenters, and our lovely hosts. Please advise on the software applications that you can recommend as project tools?

There are so many different tools out there.

  1. Choose something that will work for you, your team and the client. Keep in mind not everyone can read a project plan and a lot of people don’t understand project plans, so sometimes a simple excel sheet can also do the job.
  2. Ask around in your institution, what PM software do they use?
  3. Another factor to keep in mind is cost, as some of these tools can be very expensive.
  4. First, try it out before you buy. Almost all project management tools come with a free trial. Even if they don’t, many companies are happy to offer one if you ask.

I personally prefer to use MS Projects.

Question 2: Do we include students as one of the stakeholders during the Initiation stage? If we do, what role do we expect them to play during the Kickoff meeting?

No, I would not advise that. For the Kick-off meeting only include the key decision-makers and sort out all the nitty-gritty parts of the project. Once that is sorted, you can set up a meeting with all the lecturer to explain the project, processes and timelines.  Maybe you can add 1 Student Representative to your meetings, or create a student survey if you want their feedback/inputs.

Question 3: How do I go about analysing my stakeholders for my project? Are there templates for analysing stakeholders?

Herewith a nice link that might help you: https://masterofproject.com/blog/7514/top-5-stakeholders-analysis-techniques-in-projects-stakeholder-analysis-in-project-management

Question 4: Good afternoon, firstly let me apologize I joined late so maybe you did answer this question already. How often do you review the courses that have been developed? Do you wait for SMEs to start this process or do you initiate it? Thank you.

I think it will be very valuable to review your course at least once a year unless there are other critical or major changes in the content. I’m currently working with an Institution who review their courses after each intake.