Interdisciplinary Engineering and Science Educations – new challenges for master students

This paper summarizes valuable experiences and learning points from three years of the Erasmus funded Intensive Programme on “Implementing Europe’s Future Broadband Infrastructure”. The programme consisted of a course held each year 2012-2014 during two weeks of July, where 30-35 students and 10-12 teachers from the 4 participating universities would meet in the location of one of the partner institutions. During the three years, the programme was each year adjusted according to the observations and evaluations from the previous year.
The course was organized as a week of course modules, followed by a week of project work. The topics of the first week were defined to support the project work in the following week. The projects were based on real-life problems proposed by companies, and had to be solved in student groups with a mix of nationalities and educational backgrounds.
Among the key learning points, we can highlight the importance of clearly communicating learning goals as well as motivations for the students to work problem-based and across traditional disciplines. Also, having short time to get a
group from four different universities work together it is important to actively encourage (or enforce) the students to mix and work together throughout the course activities. Finally, we found that the model of combining course modules and projects worked well, especially if active learning approaches were used in the course modules.
Keywords: Problem Based Learning, Internationalisation, Intensive Programmes, Cross-Disciplinary projects.