The Need For Interdisciplinarity: A Case On Employees’ Perspectives

The issue of interdisciplinarity contains disparate nodes of knowledge and practices, including a wealth of information concerning the potential and value of interdisciplinary work. In the context of companies that handle large-scale and complex tasks, interdisciplinarity takes on a real-life role since its presence and importance is readily observable and, as this paper shows, a conscious, deliberate, and highly valued aspect of innovation in companies. Academic literature on the issue of interdisciplinarity asserts that engineers in the future need a wealth of competences, including ability to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams. Aalborg University in Denmark has experimented with interdisciplinarity in various PBL contexts; the guiding research problem of this paper concerns how work practices call for interdisciplinary competence development. Through this perspective, we gain insight into how interdisciplinary competences are relevant for students at AAU as a competence that must be proactively developed. The data set consists of nine interviews collected from a large Danish company. The interviews have been transcribed using Nvivo and coded according to the research problem. As the results of the qualitative data indicates, interdisciplinarity is not just an important competence for employees, but also a prerequisite for problem solving. Results indicate that interdisciplinarity is a competence that students must develop because interdisciplinarity is actively used for problem-solving in the types of jobs that engineering graduates will get in the future

Challenges for engineering students working with authentic complex problems

Engineers are important participants in solving societal, environmental and technical problems. However, due to an increasing complexity in relation to these problems new interdisciplinary competences are needed in engineering. Instead of students working with monodisciplinary problems, a situation where students work with authentic complex problems in interdisciplinary teams together with a company may scaffold development of new competences. The question is: What are the challenges for students structuring the work on authentic interdisciplinary problems? This study explores a three-day event where 7 students from Aalborg University (AAU) from four different faculties and one student from University College North Denmark (UCN), (6th-10th semester), worked in two groups at a large Danish company, solving authentic complex problems. The event was structured as a Hackathon where the students for three days worked with problem identification, problem analysis and finalizing with a pitch competition presenting their findings. During the event the students had workshops to support the work and they had the opportunity to use employees from the company as facilitators. It was an extracurricular activity during the summer holiday season. The methodology used for data collection was qualitative both in terms of observations and participants’ reflection reports. The students were observed during the whole event. Findings from this part of a larger study indicated, that students experience inability to transfer and transform project competences from their previous disciplinary experiences to an interdisciplinary setting

Interdisciplinary project types in engineering education

Problem- and project-based learning (PBL) is often highlighted as a valuable approach for addressing the need for interdisciplinarity in engineering education. However, studies indicate that applied projects in engineering education tend to be limited to a single discipline. This article presents a new project typology which can be applied in engineering education. The typology is based on an action research study in a systemic PBL environment. The model presented has two dimensions: a) the complexity of teams, ranging from single team to networks of teams, and b) the complexity of interdisciplinarity, ranging from disciplinary projects to broad interdisciplinary projects. This results in the identification of six different project types. This typology can be used as a conceptual framework for interdisciplinary learning throughout engineering education. The project types embrace both single-team projects and larger projects consisting of multiple teams working together on complex problems