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As the digital age advances, it is perhaps not surprising that the growth rate for students corresponding electronically is increasing greatly. This includes students who are working on projects in their classes. However, team dynamics is always a significant issue for students when working on teams and continues to be an even bigger source of concern for them once they graduate and go out into the work force. In this paper, the authors talk about the process of initializing a study to study the functioning of partially distributed teams and developing a framework for incorporating projects into engineering courses where students are required to work on projects virtually (with student project members located at two or more universities) and hence be better prepared for 'real world work scenarios,' when they graduate and go into industry. This course curriculum design and research will include mapping engineering management courses between the Engineering Management Departments at Texas Tech University and California State University, Northridge and creating distributed project teams, by virtue of which the students would be compelled to work both traditionally (intra-university) and virtually (inter-university) and learn about managing partially distributed teams. Pedagogically, the researchers/professors will also be compiling information and lessons learned in coordination of this inter-university educational endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University X has a newly introduced undergraduate program in Engineering Management (EM) which will be going up for ABET accreditation in Fall 2015. In this paper, the authors have discussed the efforts that are being carried out as part of the continuous improvement initiative required for ABET accreditation. As part of this work, the authors have researched undergraduate EM programs across the country and then have identified patterns which can be used as one of the guiding factors to decide on potential course offerings that the program at university X could have. These will be used for benchmarking purposes and will help carry out future research in order to continue working on program improvements. This paper is thus, a first step in a series of initiatives that will be carried out at university X as part of our continuous improvement efforts for the newly introduced undergraduate EM program. The results of this first step in continuous improvement will be presented in this paper and the later steps will continue to be published as a series of papers in both local as well as future annual ASEE conferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]