Teaching Management to Engineering Students : Acting as a Learning Organization

This paper summarizes an experience in teaching Management to undergraduate Engineering students. The aim was to enable, motivate, lead and coach students in learning management skills and concepts through their engagement in organizational and management work. This was closely associated with their reflection on such practice, and was complemented with theoretical studies, mostly self-directed and carried out in a cooperative environment – as though each class was a learning organization. We describe the pedagogical design, the projects and the activities developed with and by the students, and the way practical projects and theoretical studies interrelated. We also describe the cooperative learning environment that was built around class and mailing list discussions, the dissemination of information on paper, and the use of the Web. Students have been evaluated, through projects and papers, as they would in real work situations. Every moment of evaluation led to further learning and there was no need to resort to conventional examinations