The Impact of Integrating Project Studies into the Working Processes of Companies

Abstract

This article describes and evaluates the concept of project studies in the part-time master's degree course "Professional IT-Business" at the HTW Berlin. The concept contains several elements which are intended to enable and support work process-integrated learning, or learning in real work processes and projects in companies. The concept presents as an innovative solution for competence development through project-oriented, work process-integrated forms of teaching and learning in cooperation between the university and companies. To evaluate the effectiveness of the concept of work-process-integrated project study, a survey among 31 students was carried out concurrently testing eight hypotheses. The descriptive analysis of the survey results allowed conclusions on the potential for change and improvement of the didactic concept underlying the project study. In addition to the description of the methodology and the results obtained, conclusions were drawn from the evaluations as well as perspectives on future applications of the work-process-integrated project study.