Learner Reviews & Feedback for Fundamentals of Project Planning and Management by University of Virginia

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This was my first online course and I like it a lot. The course was well structured, well taught and covered relevant aspects of project planning and project management. It made me think about things I or our company is not doing (I'm not a project manager but impacted by it). And it gave me some tools to improve on individual and on company level. Everything was very practical and insightful. The cases helped as well and I liked the YouTube material. If there were topics that I would like to have had more information, then on Agile Project Management, as this becomes more and more important in my industry. And then it would have been helpful to get more insights on how to estimate time and especially budgets, knowing that this course is not about financial or ressource planning and understanding that these aspects vary from company to company and from project to project. Nevertheless it might have helped (me) but the course provided everything to figure it out anyway. Overall I can recommend this course for a solid base and inspiration in project planning and project management.

Great overview of the principles of Project Management! I was thinking about changing careers so this course did a good job in describing the fundamental concepts of project management. You can easily apply the concepts learned to any small/large projects that you want to work on. It is a very informative course and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to learn about or get into Project Management.

There was an emphasis on the planning & risk management phases. Also includes a few short introduction tutorials on how to use Excel & MS Project to develop and analyze schedules/graphs.

I like to take notes during the videos instead of printing out the slides. I thought the content on the slides could have been organized better and for the instructor's explanations to be more in sync with what was being shown on the slides. I sometimes used Google to find more in-depth information or clarification of certain concepts.

As the name suggests, this course offers various tools and techniques for PM at an introductory level. While the content of the course was good, an area of improvement would be in the execution of the case studies. I believe that they really held the key for a complete understanding, by providing an opportunity (in a virtual setting) to assess when and how to apply these tools. Case studies were present in every section of the course and I tried to make the best of it. However, it was more like a 'comment' section, since our assessments were not appraise/evaluated. Or it would have been appreciated if a 'correct assessment' was provided (after submitting our answers of course). Hope the course is updated in this respect.

i like how the course covers metrics to track project tracking and how lecturer walks you over how to do plan projects in MS project. I feel like i can plan my projects better with the knowledge I've gained to create WBS. However, I do feel that at times the professor superficially covered subjects that i'd like her to delve more into. For example, dealing with complexities and ambiguity as a form of risk. The least she could have done is supplemented a useful article. She also doesn't talk about PERT, but implies it in her risk variance lecture (e.g., in her Tornado Chart). I also noticed that she condenses the 5 PMBOK phases into 4 by amalgamating Monitoring and Control with Execution.

Weeks 2-3 felt very useful. Week 1 was still very abstract and in week 4 this problem repeated itself with the very general overview over Agile, without practical examples on how to actually implement such a technique. Sometimes the audio "felt" corrected to strongly, when suddenly the tone shifted and it was obvous that it was hampered with. This could use some smoothing. Overall, very positive experience and a great overview over this vast topic. Very likeable lecturer and good presentation. I suggest you actually do the case studies, they are very interesting.

Good overview of the full cycle of project management. the instructor was personable and presented professionally. The first two week's material was much easier to understand than the last. I felt the instructor went from beginner to intermediate, when the entire class should have been beginner . Students unfamiliar with project management terms and processes will have to view the lessons several times. While reading all the recommended support materials is not necessary to pass the course, it is critical to really understand the concepts covered.

This is a great introductory course to project management. The material is delivered very well and the material well chosen. The only negative I have is that some of the lectures are quite long, compared to other online courses I have done and I think would have benefited from some mini quizzes during the lectures to keep the student engaged and ensure that the material stuck. In the past I have worked as a project manager on software projects and I wish I had taken this course before starting the job. It would have helped a lot.

Die Videos sind super gut gemacht und die Inhalte verständlich erklärt. Manchmal werfen sich Fragen auf, da ist die Community im Diskussionsforum sehr hilfreich. Die Beispiele, die aus der Praxis aufgeführt werden, sind ebenfalls hilfreich. Die Dozentin hat den Kurs insgesamt sehr gut gemacht. Das Zertifikat zu erwerben ist wirklich nicht schwer, wenn man seine Zeit gut managen kann. Der Zeitaufwand ist etwas höher, wenn man saubere Notizen halten will aber es lohnt sich! Ich bin sehr zufrieden und kann den Kurs empfehlen.

Well structured course and easy to understand, however if there would be one thing that I improve would be the calculations risk analysis. I had to go to Forums to be able to find the answer on how this was calculated in Excel and go via a number of materials on the forums posted by other gurus to be able to comprehend how they got those numbers for ES/EF, LS/LF. This should be explained in the course itself and caused me additional work than planned.

Often when you are employed as a PM you are under-resourced at many junctures. Certain valuable techniques fall by the wayside and can be long forgotten. Especially in a high-paced environment such as Advertising and PR where aggressive delivery times are the norm. After many years of working "In The Wild" and delivering over 300 digital projects with budgets from 30K to 500K, it was valuable and refreshing to revisit the basics.

The course was quite interesting and provided lots of literature sources for further reading. The instructor was lovely and pleasant-to-listen. The content was very easy to understand and pretty diverse. However, I was not satisfied with the fact this MOOC can be finished by passing 4 simple tests in order to achieve the grade. I definetely wanted to practice the knowledge deeper in the weeks' assignments.

It was a very informative course for me and in my opinion the Professor explained it in such a nice and simple way and made it much easier to understand. I would have loved it however if we could have had more direction on the software tools and how to use them as the directions provided don't really show you how to use these tools effectively. This would have made it an even greater experience.

Overlooking a couple of errant quiz questions, and assumed math approaches, this course provided ample and accurate information for individuals to strongly grasp the basics (and plenty of nuances) of Project Management. It is a motivator to continue deeper learning into the overall Industry, as well as into specialized elements of the Industry, and approach either path with confidence.

Good and interesting course on the basics of project management. Videos are very clear and the information is good accessable. It could be stuffed in 1 week but spread it out over 4 weeks is better to let it sink in. It may be interesting to add a quick overview of other management styles, for example, for projects with very high uncertainties and different types of business.

It was a very good overview of how it is being a PM, the challenges a PM faces, and in the end how easy/difficult it may be to manage a project. It was great to see examples and different tools that could be used and maybe a bit more elaboration on those could be done; for example: more tutorials that can be downloaded and kept by the students for later references.