E-LEARNING AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT: ADDING NEW FEATURES TO LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

The paper presents the idea of adding project management services to educational environments, specifically to Learning Management Systems (LMSs). Project Management here is referred to as a general approach to time management, and educational contexts are no exception respect to this need. From managing the educational path of a participant to following a thesis in a university, from the preparation to an exam to the organization of a team of students working on a project, in many situations the educational tasks are mixed with project management tasks. The different types of educational "communities" could also take advantage of time and project management services. As a testbed for understanding time-management needs students, a special case of athletes enrolled in our University has been analyzed, where the needs of this special community of students have been used to validate time and project management needs. For example, how to manage appointments, deadlines, milestones, etc for such a special case of University student has inspired some special features of the mobile application associated with the LMS. The paper describes how our software platform, traditionally used for e-learning activities, has been equipped with a fully-fledged set of tools compatible with the most used project management standards, including task planning, costs, and resource management functionalities.