Group Organized Project Work in Distance Education

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 Internet-mediated 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