Medialogy – An Interdisciplinary Education Challenge in a Problem Based Learning Environment

Different new educations in the field of media and technology are constantly developing worldwide. Searching on the Internet almost every university has programs in both media and communication. Several universities are discussing the challenges to offer double degrees, so the students can combine an individual education according to their interests. Other universities are offering interdisciplinary educations in the field of media technology. Having worked with those interdisciplinary engineering and science educations for several years, it seems to be a challenge to define the students’ key competences, and the ability of such educations to provide new scientific paradigms and disciplines.
This paper investigates the challenges connected to a new interdisciplinary science and engineering program: Medialogy at Aalborg University. The program includes Bachelor and Master level educations and combines humanistic, sociological and technical aspects of media technology. The focus in this paper is on the students and their way of using the interdisciplinary aspects in their study. Some of the overall questions dealt with are: How do students understand and use the interdisciplinary approach and how do they carry out and combine the different disciplines when working with a problem in their projects?
In the paper we describe how the students are using the interdisciplinary nature of Medialogy in their 6th semester projects. First we will introduce Medialogy, and then we will focus on the interdisciplinary nature of the program and establish a simple model for understanding the special interdisciplinary profile of the Medialogy knowledge. Next we introduce the B.Sc. Medialogy program and the Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach. Finally we analyze and discuss the interdisciplinary content of 6th semester projects from a year group. For the analysis we use Bloom’s taxonomy and the aim described in the study plan. We can conclude that the PBL approach assures that the students are forced to get knowledge about the problem area they want to work with in their project so they have established a good problem understanding as a basis for choosing the sufficient knowledge elements and combine them in an interdisciplinary way to get the best solution of their chosen problem.