It is over, the end has come. My distance learning experience has finished after 8 weeks of directed learning. Am I sad? Yes. Am I glad I undertook an online certificate in Advanced Strategic project Management from Villanova University? Yes. Am I now the proud owner of a wooden framed certificate? Oh Yes!
Previous posts of mine (here and here) have charted my journey over the last eight weeks, looking at why I was undertaking this course, and my progress and thoughts half way through. In this post, I hope to wrap up my thinking.
I was interested in undertaking this course to further my understanding of strategic project management, and to this end I have succeeded. As always with these types of course, given the format and time duration, they give a great insight into many topics, but cannot necessarily cover all in significant depth. This course gave me a greater understanding than some I have taken in the past – part of this is the level of the course, and some is the approach taken by Villanova (more on this below). However, I have also been left with some questions around some of the topics, and a desire to learn more – a great way to maintain my self guided CPD! A quick search on Amazon, Google and You Tube shows that there are plenty of free or inexpensive resources out there.
The course has been diverse and wide ranging in topics. I cannot hope to cover all of these here – you will have to take a look at the course information yourself (or my previous posts). Suffice to say, discussions covered strategic project management, optimising project results, dynamics of project management and best practices in project management, with a wide range of sub-topics. There was good insight from the majority of the lectures (all lecturers’ styles vary, independent of delivery format), with a large portion of the content coming from or with reference to a book by David Cleland and Lewis Ireland entitled Project Management – Strategic design and implementation – a worthy read in itself.
My other reason for undertaking this course was to asses a novel way of learning. Villanova’s approach utilised structured web based resources, including video lectures, further reading, chat rooms, and question and answer forums alongside lecture notes, a project management book, and DVD lectures. For me, this approach was ideal, as it allowed me to study at my own pace within the confines of a weekly structured course within an eight-week limited timescale. This approach, meant that I had flexibility to learn when best suited me, be it around work or personal commitments, but I had to keep going as the course ‘ran-out’, thus ensuring I progressed at a reasonable rate and completed on time.
I only have three negative elements to comment on, and these are not the fault of the course per se. Being an American university, and primarily teaching American students, many of the references and terminology was American biased, e.g. PMBoK – I just had to get used to this, and bare in mind the terminology and approach I an primarily used to. Secondly, there were occasional references to other Villanova courses in the Masters Certificate programme – not a major issue, but it did assume you were undertaking the entire suite of certificates, as opposed to a single standalone one. Thirdly, and most disappointingly for me, was not being able to attend the weekly live chat rooms to discuss the topics with the lecturers and other students. There was no obvious way around this as it was due to the time difference between America and the UK, with the sessions being held in the early hours of the morning UK time. Luckily, the sessions were recorded and archived so that you could listen to them after the event.
So, would I recommend undertaking this course, or other similar ones? Yes. I fulfilled my ambitions for the course, but it did take up a significant amount of time, and this needs to be taken into account when juggling work and personal priorities – this is the same for any distance learning course or self guided learning. I am happy with this, as I allocate quite a bit of time to CPD related activities, be they online, reading, seminars, workshops, networking etc – this is partly my interest in project management, but also a career strategy for self improvement and knowledge acquisition.
Last, but not least, I have to say thank you to Villanova University and Arras People for giving me the opportunity to undertake this online course, it is greatly appreciated!
