Developing a course

After my PhD, I had the opportunity to develop a course on project management for life science students at the University of Tübingen.

Honestly, I wasn't quite sure what I'd signed up for. What did I, as a biomedical scientist, know about project management? But as I dove into the topic, I realized that of course I knew the basics. Hadn't I just spent four years running a project? I knew the challenges of managing priorities, planning milestones, communicating results, and keeping a research project moving.

Project management is a vast field, so we chose to focus on the practical skills students need to navigate Master's thesis and PhD projects just a little more smoothly.

We also quickly realized that these skills are better learned through experience than theory. Lecturing was kept short, while workshops and discussions with guest researchers took center stage. After our first pilot, we went one step further and moved almost all theory to self-study, freeing up class time for discussion and practice.

I spent the following months developing concise, visually engaging self-study booklets. We also introduced AI-guided reflection exercises, encouraging students to connect the concepts to their own experiences while exploring responsible ways of using AI for learning.

The revised course was presented at the SEFI 2026 engineering education conference, and we are now preparing a journal paper on the implementation and evaluation of the course.

Curious about the course? The self-study booklet and workshop materials are openly available on Zenodo.