I teach in the postgraduate project management programs at UTS. The cohort is mostly working professionals studying part-time, many of them international, most already managing projects and taking the degree to formalise what they have learnt on site or in an office. They are demanding in a particular way: anything that cannot be connected to next week at work is quickly identified as filler. Since 2016 I have run 46 subject deliveries here across seven subjects, and the feedback record covers all of it.
Starting badly
My first delivery of 15319 Project Risk, Procurement and Quality Management, in the second session of 2016, scored 2.64 for the subject and 2.75 for my teaching, against university means of 3.92 and 4.09. That is more than a full point below the UTS average on both measures. I include it because it is the beginning of the only claim on this page that I think is worth making.
The second subject went the same way. Across its first four deliveries, from 2017 to 2020, 15317 Advanced Project Risk Management averaged 0.70 below the university mean, with a delivery in the first COVID session of 2020 that reached 2.70.
What I changed
Most of it was unglamorous. I rebuilt assessments so that the artefact students produced resembled something their employer would recognise, and brought policy documents, evaluation reports, audit findings and live project data into class rather than describing them. I redesigned the group work in 15327 Managing Project Complexity around a collaborative activity intended to get students through the harder concepts before the individual assignment, supported by a Learner Experience Design grant in 2017. I started using Mentimeter, Miro and Padlet to get responses from students who will not speak in a room of forty.
The other half was format. These subjects run fortnightly, as full-day weekend sessions and as four-day intensive blocks, and fully online, on campus and hybrid. Each combination needs different pacing, and most of what I got wrong early was pacing rather than content. In 2020 all of it moved online inside a session, which forced a faster version of the same redesign.
Four days
Most of these subjects are now taught as a four-day block. Students take leave or give up a weekend, the whole contact time for the subject runs across four consecutive days, and the assessment is submitted in the weeks afterwards. The format exists because the cohort is working, and it is the single largest constraint on how I teach.
Two things about it are unforgiving. The first is fatigue. Attention across a full day does not hold, and material that would survive a two-hour weekly class dies in the third hour of the second day, so a day has to be built in short segments with the work handed back to the room often. The second is that there is no next week. In a weekly subject a session that goes badly can be repaired in the following one. In a block, if the second day loses the room, the third and fourth are lost with it, and the assessment is then written by students who never recovered.
The format also does something a weekly subject cannot. A cohort that spends four consecutive days together forms quickly, and group work becomes workable rather than an administrative fiction. By the second afternoon people are using each other's projects as material, and on most topics the room holds more current experience than I do.
That last point is most of what I think about when planning a subject. These students already manage projects. They do not need to be told that risk should sit with the party best able to manage it. They need a reason to look again at an allocation they accepted last year, and language for saying why it was wrong. So the material is built around documents and cases rather than around the frameworks that summarise them: a value for money report, an inquiry transcript, a payment mechanism, the schedule of a contract that failed. I teach the cases I research, which is convenient rather than principled, but it does mean the examples are ones I have been through in detail and can be pressed on in the room.
The model has one clear limit. Anything that needs spaced practice, where a student has to attempt something, get it wrong, and try again a week later, does not compress into four days. That bears directly on one of the subjects below.
What the scores did
For 15319, the subject taught longest and most often, the average gap to the university mean moved through three phases. Across the first four deliveries, from 2016 to early 2018, it sat 0.65 below. From 2019 to early 2022 it sat 0.18 below, which is roughly parity. From the second session of 2022 onward it has sat 0.20 above.
The first delivery scored 2.64 against a university mean of 3.92. The most recent scored 4.69 against 4.13.
15317 shows the same shape more sharply. Its first four deliveries averaged 0.70 below the university mean; the six deliveries from 2021 to 2026 have averaged 0.29 above, and every one of them since 2022 has been above. The most recent deliveries of both subjects, in the first session of 2026, scored 4.69 and 4.50 for the subject and 4.45 for my teaching in each.
Where it still goes wrong
Not everything followed. 15115 Advances in Project Management, the program's core research subject and the one I care most about, has gone the other way: it scored well in 2019 and 2020, then drifted, and its most recent delivery in the second session of 2025 came in at 3.00 for the subject and 3.22 for teaching, more than a point below the university mean on both. My working explanation is the one above: research design is exactly the material that needs several attempts spread over weeks, and the block format removes the spacing. Relevance is the second half of it, since research design is also the hardest thing in the program to connect to next week at work. Both are hypotheses rather than findings, and neither excuses the result.
The variance elsewhere is also larger than any story about steady improvement can absorb. 15319 dropped to 3.29 in the first session of 2022, sitting between deliveries that scored 4.00 and 4.11. A July intensive of 15327 in 2024 scored 3.40. 15362 Managing Project Contracts scored 4.22, then 3.36, then 4.10 across three consecutive years. I can account for some of this by cohort size and format, and not for the rest of it.
What the numbers cannot carry
Response counts in this record run from three to twenty-two, and response rates from 18 to 82 per cent. The best result on the page, 4.80 for the subject and 5.00 for teaching in the first session of 2023, came from five responses at a 23 per cent rate. At that size a single student moves the mean by a fifth of a point, so the peaks are not evidence of much and neither are most of the troughs. What is more defensible is the direction across nineteen deliveries of one subject and ten of another, which is harder to produce by accident.
The survey also measures satisfaction rather than learning. A subject can be enjoyed and not understood, and the two subjects with the best scores are the two I have taught longest, so familiarity with the material and improvement as a teacher cannot be separated in this data.
Program direction and curriculum
I direct the postgraduate project management programs, which covers the graduate certificate, the master's and the master's in property development and project management, having held the role in 2019 and 2020 and returned to it in 2026, and having been associate director from 2017. The substantive work is program governance, curriculum quality and accreditation, including taking the programs through re-accreditation with the Project Management Institute's Global Accreditation Center. Since 2022 I have also served on GAC onsite visit teams assessing other institutions, which is the same exercise from the other side and the fastest way I have found to see what a program looks like to an external reader.
Alongside that I coordinated short forms of learning for the school from 2021 to 2025, developing micro-credential offerings against the postgraduate pathways, and served on the faculty curriculum, new product, and teaching and learning quality committees.
One outcome from 15115 is worth recording despite everything above about that subject. A student who took it decided to pursue a doctorate, won a competitive Research Training Program scholarship, and is now a candidate in our school.
Teaching elsewhere
Before UTS I taught undergraduate construction subjects at the University of Newcastle from 2013 to 2016, covering infrastructure development, facilities management, procurement and tendering, and project closure, and project cost management at the National University of Singapore in 2012 and 2013. Undergraduate cohorts are a different problem from working professionals, and I would not claim the two transfer neatly.
I also teach postgraduate public-private partnerships occasionally in China, at Chongqing University from 2021 to 2024, at Tsinghua University in 2021, and at Chang'an University in 2019. These are short, intensive and taught to students who mostly intend to work in the sector rather than research it, which is a useful discipline. If an argument from my own work will not survive contact with that audience, it usually needs revising rather than restating.
Figures on this page are from UTS Student Feedback Survey results. Subject and teaching means are on a five-point scale and are compared with the university mean for the same session.