Interdisciplinary collaboration in engineering education

Interdisciplinary collaboration in engineering education Anette Kolmos, Jette Egelund Holgaard, and Henrik Worm Routhe from Aalborg University discuss findings from the InterPBL research project and highlight the advantages of interdisciplinary collaboration in engineering education. Sustainability and climate issues can only be understood and resolved through interdisciplinary collaboration across various disciplines. Technological solutions are system-oriented, necessitating extensive collaboration between stakeholders from academia and society. As a result, it is critical that engineering students gain experience and knowledge of cross-disciplinary collaboration. However, interdisciplinary collaboration across disciplinary boundaries is extremely difficult. InterPBL, a research project at Aalborg University funded by the Grundfos Foundation, seeks to improve interdisciplinary collaboration in engineering education. In the InterPBL project, we discovered that the approach to interdisciplinary projects was overly simplistic due to a lack of understanding of the various forms that interdisciplinary projects can take. A framework was created based on empirical data, with six categories of disciplinary and interdisciplinary problem-based projects. These are defined by two dimensions: the type of knowledge, which ranges from disciplines to narrow and broad interdisciplinary problems. Figure 1 illustrates the project collaboration pattern, which ranges from single project teams to multi-teams with multiple student teams working together.