Cross Disciplinary Team Work (Autumn 2019)

Abstract

This course reflects ITU’s founding and unique idea of integrating research and education across disciplines. The course offers practical and theoretical perspectives on cross-disciplinarity. Hands-on teamwork on a real-world project prompts collaboration between students from ITU's four master level study programmes. The projects are based on four themes, presented by external companies or institutions. Each team of students, however, define and develop their particular project. The course is unique because the reflection on the collaboration and the integration of contributions from other disciplines are integral parts of the learning outcomes. The learning outcomes focus on the ability to identify, work with, reflect on and communicate own and others’ disciplinary approaches through small-team, collaborative development of a project. 

Description

The aim of this course is to give the students the possibility to obtain insights in other disciplines, reflect and exploit own disciplinary approaches, work across disciplines and reflect upon how cross-disciplinarity may be beneficial for innovative solutions in theory and practice. We consider interdisciplinarity to take place between related research areas as well as between traditionally fundamentally different research fields. Working in cross-disciplinary teams, means being able to communicate knowledge of one’s own discipline to team members from other disciplines and create a space to understand, integrate and accept contributions from other disciplines. The course holds a triple aim for the students: 

1. To let students develop a strong consciousness of their own professional competences and of where and how they can use their competences in cross-disciplinary teams. 
2. To let students gain experience with real-world project work and to exploit own competences while integrating others’. 
3. To reflect upon and develop new ways of thinking and working with IT related questions from different perspectives.

 The course is organized in four “houses” that each works with an overall theme. Four main teachers are each responsible for a house. Each house is sub-divided into three clusters that again are organized in teams of four students. Each cluster will be affiliated with one teacher and one TA. The structure provides a common point of departure for the learning activities and teamwork and the intention is to make sure that each team has substantial freedom and responsibility for own learning outcomes.

Throughout the course, updated descriptions, guidelines, overview of the structure, and curriculum will be available on LearnIT.

Formal prerequisites

Intended learning outcomes

After the course, the student should be able to:

• Identify and define own disciplinary approaches and communicate these to other students.
• Identify, define and describe a problem from a real-world context in collaboration with a team.
• Based on the description of the problem, combine and exploit the different disciplinary approaches in order to work with it.
• Integrate contributions from own and other disciplines into the project work.
• Collaborate constructively with students from other disciplines on a project.
• Communicate the results of a cross-disciplinary academic project to both practitioners and academics.
• Use the practical project as an opportunity to reflect on the challenges of cross-disciplinary work, conceptually, theoretically and methodologically

Learning activities

Students work in small teams. To ensure diversity, each team has four participants from at least three different study programs. Teams collaborate within a cluster of teams. All teams are supervised by teachers from the involved study programmes and TAs. 

Learning activities include: 

• Project work 
• Team exercises
• Creating and maintaining a team project journal
• Presentations (internal and towards external stakeholders) 
• Writing a reflective, critical report  

Mandatory activities

There will be two mandatory assignments during the course. Each demands active and documented participation of all team members.

1)      Keep a project journal for the team throughout the semester (base the report on it); Individual, named uploads to the project journal from each team member are mandatory.

2)      Do a team project presentation at a cluster event. Each team member’s presence and active participation are mandatory.

The student will receive the grade NA (not approved) at the ordinary exam, if the mandatory activities are not approved and the student will use an exam attempt.

Course literature

The course literature is published in the course page in LearnIT.

Ordinary exam

Exam type:
C: Submission of written work, external (bestået/ikke bestået)
Exam variation:
CG: Submission of written work for groups. As with all exams, a grading foundation must be established to make individual grading possible. You must clearly identify which parts of the work submitted you are responsible for.
Exam description:

Written 20 pages team report (teams of 4). 

The team report has two parts: Part one on the project (seven (7) collectively written pages); Part two: on interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinary teamwork (one (1) collectively written page, three (3) individually written pages from each team member). 

Details are described in separate guideline documents, which will be available when the course starts.

Time and date