From Fruit Salads to Future Skills: How Challenge Based, Interdisciplinary Learning can Help Students Develop the Skills they Need to Navigate an Unpredictable Future

This presentation introduces Collaborations in Practice, a newly designed course built around challenge-based learning that brings students into interdisciplinary teams to develop solutions to societal problems. The course is developed within the University of Glasgow’s novel Curriculum for Life framework, which is a suite of credit-bearing courses that sit alongside core disciplines and programmes and are designed to support students to grow as global citizens, creative leaders, change makers and social innovators. We share early insights from a pilot evaluation that explored how students’ perceptions of interdisciplinary working developed across the course. Emerging themes show how collaborating across disciplines to solve real-world problems can help students develop the skills desired by industry and grow more confident in navigating uncertain futures. We conclude by considering what these findings mean for tertiary learning and teaching, including pathways into university, second year entry and articulation from the FE sector. The session offers practical evidence of how carefully designed, interdisciplinary, learning can strengthen student success in a shifting landscape.