Cross Disciplinary Team Work (Autumn 2021)
Official course description:
Course info
Programme
Staff
Course semester
Exam
Abstract
It requires the expertise of different disciplines to discuss and address many of today's societal issues, such as sustainability, wellbeing, data ethics, and data security. As an IT University student, you develop specific unique disciplinary skills at your study programs, but in collaborations you are most effective when you place your efforts in the wider ecosystem of change. The world needs professionals and academics who can critically evaluate their own and others’ methods, frameworks and tools and bring them to bear with people of other professions. The IT University therefore aims to help you develop your interdisciplinary innovation skills together with fellow students from other study programs.
Course has been revised for 2021Description
ITUs Interdisciplinary Innovation Project is the new name for the revised Cross Disciplinary Team Work.
The purpose of the course is to provide the students with the possibility to become skilled, efficient, and critically reflective collaborators.
The course is
centrally structured around a project. The practical work is intended to
interact with the conceptual process of critical investigation and reflection;
both facilitate and necessitate each other. The aim is not to incrementally
improve services and products, but, through interdisciplinary collaboration and
prototyping, to explore and expand innovation spaces. The open ended and
exploratory project is a vehicle for students from different study programs to
engage with each other and their disciplinary approaches, skills, and
experiences.
ITUs Interdisciplinary Innovation Project enables students to employ and reflect on their own discipline’s potentials and limitations, to communicate their disciplinary perspective to team members from other disciplines, and to embrace other disciplinary approaches to the process and problem. Such interdisciplinary cooperation facilitates an inclusive and constructive workspace and opens the space for truly innovative designs.
With the project, student teams are expected to address a challenge connected to an external partner, to a research project, or based on a case. Teams identify and select a problem to address, and design and explore a solution addressing usage, technical solution, and the organisational/economic context. Examples for the latter include exploring an entrepreneurial realisation of the concept, exploring economic viability of a software ecosystem or platform, or organisational integration of user driven innovation.
A productive learning process requires:
● Individual and collective responsibility for own learning.
● Taking multiple perspectives to understand and reduce the number of ’inevitable surprises’.
● Awareness of one’s own role and ability to contribute your own expertise and competences.
● Ability to integrate experience and competences from disciplinary approaches different from your own.
● Social and communicative methods and tools for collaborating efficiently around a complex task in an organization setting.
The overall course theme is sustainability. The course is organized in eight clusters. Each cluster collaborates with one or more partners or researchers who can serve as inspirators, motivators, professional resources for the teams. Every project has a focus on a specific problem area within the general theme.
Each cluster is organized in teams of four to five students from at least three different study programs. Four teachers are each responsible for two clusters. Each cluster is further affiliated with a TA. All clusters and teams operate within the common framework and share several resources. Each team, however, has substantial freedom and responsibility for their own learning outcomes.
Students have access to descriptions of different sub-clusters from mid-August. Before course- start, they can nominate three priorities. Course management will assign students to clusters and teams according to priorities as far as possible. In case students have a project idea that fits the IT University’s Interdisciplinary Innovation Project and have already found a group of four to five students from at least three different M.Sc. programs, we will aim to accommodate the team in the context of the course.
Formal prerequisites
This course is a 3rd semester course on MSc Computer Science, Games (Tech and Design), KDDIT and DIM programmes
Intended learning outcomes
After the course, the student should be able to:
- Address relevant, real-world challenges through interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and problem-solving.
- Explore and employ the specific properties and qualities of one's own and others’ disciplinary perspectives and integrate them throughout the course.
- Conceptualize, design, and develop an innovative, functional, digital prototype.
- Use the prototype to explore the proposed challenge and to inform the investigation and the academic argument
- Communicate clearly and effectively the understandings and insights from the interdisciplinary project work to both practitioners and academics.
- Critically and conceptually reflect on the challenges and innovation potentials of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches.
Learning activities
Students work in small teams. To ensure diversity, each team has four to five 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 programs and TAs.
Learning activities include:
● Project work
● Team & cluster exercises
● Lectures by teachers and guest teachers
● Presentations by researchers and experts
● Creating and maintaining a team project journal
● Presentations (internal and towards external stakeholders)
● Discussing and writing the exam report
Mandatory activities
There will be three mandatory assignments during the course. Each demands active and documented participation of all team members. Details about all three assignments are outlined in the Student Guidelines 2021. The mandatory activities are all steppingstones for the learning process and the work that is subject to the examination.
1.
Submit project and process outline after 3 weeks.
Rationale:
MA1 assures that the students in
their team discuss and take necessary decisions on the problem they want to
address and the way they plan to tackle, so that they have enough time to work
with the project. Teams are in dialogue with teachers and TAs during
supervision sessions about the project and process outline prior to the
decision.
The team uploads a one-page description of the project and process plan in the team’s TEAM folder.
2. Keep a
project journal for the team throughout the semester; each week the team
collectively writes and uploads brief texts in the journal, on the practical
project work and the team process; the journal also functions as a project
memory, a repository for texts, documents, and other material.
Rationale: MA 2 is designed to encourage the students to
reflect on their interdisciplinary collaboration throughout the project and to
provide a base for the individual parts of the exam reports. TAs and teachers
provide frequent feedback in writing in the team’s TEAM folder and during
supervision sessions.
3. Do a
team project presentation at a cluster event by the end of the course. Each
team member’s presence and active participation are mandatory.
Rationale: MA 3 has two major goals: a) that the students
finish the main work with the project in time to have enough time to prepare
the exam report and b) that they receive feedback from external stakeholders,
teachers, and fellow students in time for addressing feedback in their exam
report. The feedback is provided orally in relation to the presentation.
The MA is approved by the teachers in writing in the team’s TEAM channel. MAs are approved when they fulfil the requirements that are outlined in the student guide.
2nd attempts for each of the mandatory assignments will follow the format and requirements of the ordinary assignments. Deadlines for 2nd attempts will be in time for approvement before exam submission.
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
A
curriculum with selected texts will be available one week before the course
starts. Individual students and teams are also expected to contribute with
relevant texts of their own choice.
Student Activity Budget
Estimated distribution of learning activities for the typical student- Preparation for lectures and exercises: 10%
- Lectures: 10%
- Exercises: 10%
- Project work, supervision included: 55%
- Exam with preparation: 15%
Ordinary exam
Exam type:C: Submission of written work, External (Pass / Fail)
Exam variation:
C1G: Submission of written work for groups
Written team report in two parts:
Part one on the project (10 (ten) collectively written pages);
Part two: on interdisciplinarity and on teamwork and collaboration (one (1) collectively written page, three (3) individually written pages from each team member). Details are described in the Student Guidelines 2021, which will be available a week before the course starts.
Group
- Group of 4-5 students
reexam
Exam type:C: Submission of written work, External (Pass / Fail)
Exam variation:
C1G: Submission of written work for groups