Building Shared Vision & Minding Gaps: Exploring Interdisciplinary Online Curricula from an Arts & Design Perspective

Paper

This session explores recent collaborative curricular efforts with diverse academic partners in the design and development of degree programs and courses that span disciplines. Approaching these collaborations from the perspective of an arts and design college, this session describes the process of finding willing partners to examine intersections and find new areas. Examples will include a multidisciplinary digital media design degree that involves three academic colleges (arts/design, communications, and information science), a forensic photography program partnering the colleges of arts/design with forensic science, and art history partnering with geography to create a course exploring the minerals used in cave paintings.

These example serve to illuminate the benefits of intersectional efforts. Finding these valuable and under-explored spaces between disciplines is the goal of a recent push for "integrative studies" curricula that encourage seemingly divergent academic areas to work together and find fertile common ground.

Takeaway

The takeaway from the session will include strategies for how to iterate toward a shared vision with diverse academic partners. We will also present the aspects of these partnerships that can be problematic: differences in academic cultures, teaching and research methods that vary by discipline, and the additional work required to coordinate work involving multiple academic entities.

Abstract

Interdisciplinary programs and courses afford students the chance to create pathways that best align to their long-term goals, breaking through disciplinary silos. And in an online context, interdisciplinary programs and courses can distribute the risk, work, and reward across academic units, ideally fostering greater faculty buy-in, sharing best practices, and enabling faster development. In this session, we'll discuss the development of cross-college online curricula. Specifically, we'll share the strategies that were successful in developing programs and courses that span traditional academic domains as well as the challenges and obstacles we encountered. We will discuss the roles and resources that supported success from the planning and curricular development phase through course design and delivery to program launch, and consider the process from a faculty, learning design unit, and administrative support unit (such as admissions and advising) perspective. We will provide examples of current projects that fall under a recent push to create "integrative studies" courses that explicitly merge divergent fields in creative and compelling ways. Finally we will discuss how we, along with our academic partners, developed a shared vision and identified gaps (curricular and administrative) along the way.