Official course description:

Full info last published 26/01-22
Course info
Language:
English
ECTS points:
7.5
Course code:
KICRDTW1KU
Participants max:
380
Offered to guest students:
no
Offered to exchange students:
no
Offered as a single subject:
no
Programme
Level:
MSc. Master
Programme:
Cross-disciplinary Courses
Staff
Course manager
Associate Professor
Teacher
PhD student
Teacher
Associate Professor
Teacher
Assistant Professor
Teacher
Full Professor
Course semester
Semester
Efterår 2021
Start
30 August 2021
End
31 January 2022
Exam
Exam type
ordinær
Internal/External
ekstern censur
Grade Scale
bestået/ikke bestået
Exam Language
GB
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 2021

Description

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
Exam submission description:
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 submission:
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

Time and date