No Books, No Classes, No Assignments: The Future of Cross-disciplinary Learning

Description

Our panel of cross-disciplinary students from design, business, and computer science will present the digital application we built and hold a Q&A session. Mentored by faculty from three different colleges, our team tackled a real-world problem for a non-profit organization. Team members will share the fifteen-month journey to create version one of a software solution to improve the operations management of an organization that serves the local community.

The goal of this workshop is to share a student perspective on the future of cross-disciplinary projects. We will describe the challenges and opportunities of working with students from other majors. We will explain the differences between learning through traditional curriculum versus learning through an experimental group project. We will share our predictions about how a project such as ours might be used to build curriculum and research opportunities, especially for work on digital applications.

Timetable

The group will spend 20 minutes describing the journey and demonstrating methods we used from each disciplines' pedagogical approaches: Design, user experience techniques; Business, continuous program improvement; Computer Science, agile thinking.

We will allot 25 minutes for a facilitated Q&A. We will prepare a 3-5 questions to get things started then allow questions from the audience.

Takeaway

Participants will leave understanding how projects outside of traditional curriculum benefit students, academic programs, and the community; how multi-disciplinary teams function when given freedom to solve a complex problem on their own; how team members interact with clients in a real-world setting; and how faculty can guide students as individuals and as a team through a project of this scope.

Abstract

After the junior year, and especially in graduate school, most college students interact primarily with students in the same major. They share the same classes, same professors, and same assignments. However, there is a growing interest in multidisciplinary projects as educators seek to prepare students for the real world, where employees are expected to work together and be able to communicate effectively.

Our panel will discuss an experiment in learning where students collaborated on a project outside of any traditional classroom setting. We did not have one professor, rather we had three faculty mentors. This project was not for course credit or a scholarship. Instead, students pitched their idea to investors and obtained seed money for version one of their software solution. We were not assigned a problem; we had to use methods from their own disciplines to research an organization, identify pain points, define a problem, and build a solution. The project was not bound by traditional semester deadlines. The students worked the project to completion regardless of the university calendar. Our project is one way to improve teaching and learning in academia, and we want to educate others about our experience.