Evaluating the Role of Transdisciplinary Course Design and Its Efficacy in Teaching a Personal Communication Course for Engineering Students

This innovative practice full paper seeks to gauge the significance of using a transdisciplinary approach in designing a personal communication course for engineering students. The design of a humanities or a communication course is critically important when delivered to engineering students as these courses contain non-technical subject knowledge which is not a part of the regular engineering curriculum. Therefore, while conventional course design structures, typically composed of lectures, quizzes, lab work and examinations, have shown to be efficient methods for teaching core engineering courses, these same conventional course designs become ineffective for teaching communication courses in an engineering context. This research, based upon a course design innovation shows that the context provided by the core engineering course offered a meaningful and valuable environment for the practical application of personal communication course outputs. This research was conducted on a personal communication course taught to first-year engineering students. This course was redesigned through an interdisciplinary collaboration with the Programming Data Structures (PDS) course. The critical skills associated with personal communication were instructed and practised in the context of the PDS course project, as the PDS course, by design, is centred around a team-based project. However, traditionally the PDS course does not provide training on how to effectively build and communicate within a team to realize the objectives of its student projects which are always done by a team of students. Thus, the personal communication and PDS courses were able to complement one another with each one providing context for learning in the other respectively. This study uses a repeated measures research design and gathers data from 104 students using their class performance to gauge their learning efficacy and a survey that used both a subjective and objective questionnaire in which the students’ perceptions of the value of transdisciplinary course design was gauged after undertaking the course. The course was taught in two parts, each culminating in a project. The first part (control group) project was done without any transdisciplinary collaboration. The second project (experiment group) had a transdisciplinary collaboration with the PDS project. The data shows that for the students, the context provided by the PDS course project offered a meaningful and valuable environment for the practical application of personal communication course outputs. Additionally, student performance data reveals that the experiment group, with collaborative design, performed better than the control group. This shows that when communication courses take on a transdisciplinary design by collaborating with another core engineering course in this case with PDS, it increases the efficacy of learning communication courses for engineering students.