Background: Societal challenges that call for a new type of engineer suggest the need for the implementation of interdisciplinary engineering education (IEE). The aim of IEE is to train engineering students to bring together expertise from different disciplines in a single context. This review synthesizes IEE research with a focus on characterizing vision, teaching practices, and support. Purpose: We aim to show how IEE is conceptualized, implemented, and facilitated in higher engineering education at the levels of curricula and courses. This aim leads to two research questions:. What aspects of vision, teaching, and support have emerged as topics of interest in empirical studies of IEE?. What points of attention regarding vision, teaching, and support can be identified in empirical studies of IEE as supporting or challenging IEE?. Scope/Method: Ninety-nine studies published between 2005 and 2016 were included in a qualitative analysis across studies. The procedure included formulation of research questions, searching and screening of studies according to inclusion/exclusion criteria, description of study characteristics, appraisal, and synthesis of results. Conclusions: Challenges exist for identifying clear learning goals and assessments for interdisciplinary education in engineering (vision). Most pedagogy for interdisciplinary learning is designed to promote collaborative teamwork requiring organization and team management. Our review suggests that developing interdisciplinary skills, knowledge, and values needs sound pedagogy and teaming experiences that provide students with authentic ways of engaging in interdisciplinary practice (teaching). Furthermore, there is a limited understanding of what resources hinder the development of engineering programs designed to support interdisciplinarity (support).

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jee.20347

Interdisciplinary engineering education : A review of vision, teaching, and support

While there have been numerous initiatives to promote and recruit students into postsecondary studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) around the world, traditional programs of studies for both K to 12 school and teacher education still lack an integrative approach to these disciplines. Addressing this concern, the Werklund School of Education of the University of Calgary started to offer a course in STEM education for the undergraduate Bachelor of Education program. The purpose of this article is to document the first iterations of this course. We draw from narratives of four instructors, including the coordinator of the course, and administrators who were actively involved in creation and approval of the course. We describe the course and its connection to the philosophy of the program, examine the context in which this course was conceived—including both national and provincial policy—and address some challenges and possibilities experienced by administrators, instructors and students during the creation and implementation of the course.

https://online-journals.org/index.php/i-jep/article/download/5965/4158

Pioneering STEM Education for Pre-Service Teachers

This paper presents the experienced difficulties of students participating in the multidisciplinary, remote collaborating engineering design course challenge-based innovation at CERN. This is with the aim to identify learning barriers and improve future learning experiences. We statistically analyse the rated differences between distinct design activities, educational background and remote vs. co-located collaboration. The analysis is based on a quantitative and qualitative questionnaire (N = 37). Our analysis found significant ranking differences between remote and co-located activities. This questions whether the remote factor might be a barrier for the originally intended learning goals. Further a correlation between analytical and converging design phases was identified. Hence, future facilitators are suggested to help students in the transition from one design phase to the next rather than only teaching methods in the individual design phases. Finally, we discuss how educators address the ide...

Mapping remote and multidisciplinary learning barriers: lessons from challenge-based innovation at CERN

Globalization is about the interconnectedness of people and businesses across the world that eventually leads to global cultural, political and economic integration. It is the ability to move and communicate easily with others all over the world in order to conduct business internationally. The word, globalization, is relatively new, coined in the late 1970’s. The airplane, the telephone, and the Internet are just three inventions, which are attributable to the spread of globalization. Due to the increased demand in the high tech industry around the world, business and industry have potential for huge profits working globally. So in today’s world, globalization is an important concept for students in higher education to understand and appreciate because of the demand in business and industry to hire people who can work with people of other nations and cultures and if need be can travel independently internationally to promote their business or industry. In addition, the world faces global challenges that will take interdisciplinary groups to solve these challenges; providing access to clean water for everyone on this planet and making clean renewable energy affordable just to name a few. These global challenges will need to be solved through the gathering and sharing of knowledge across disciplines, institutions, and other entities institutions on a global scale. Creating meaningful relationships that work globally is in itself challenging. In this chapter, we will look at global challenges, the makeup of model collaborative international teams; the importance of teaching globalization in higher education, how to best teach globalization, and discuss best practices in this area.

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The Importance of Globalization in Higher Education

In general engineering studies focus on the technical skills in their own discipline. However, in their subsequent industrial careers, a significant portion of their time needs to be devoted to non...

/pdf/enhancing-non-technical-skills-by-a-multidisciplinary-2gpd30vz4j.pdf

Enhancing non-technical skills by a multidisciplinary engineering summer school

Most university-level engineering studies produce technically skilled engineers. However, typically students face several difficulties when working in multidisciplinary teams when they initiate their industrial careers. In a globalised world, it becomes increasingly important that engineers are capable of collaborating across disciplinary boundaries and exhibit soft competencies, like communication, interpersonal and social skills, time planning, creativity, initiative, and reflection. To prepare a group of engineering and industrial design students to acquire those capabilities, an international summer school that combined industrial design with different kinds of engineering disciplines was organised on the site of Bang & Olufsen (B&O) in Denmark. This multidisciplinary engineering summer school was attended by students from six European university-level teaching institutions and was supervised by teachers from those institutions and industrial experts from B&O. The main aim of the summer school was to ...

/pdf/a-multidisciplinary-engineering-summer-school-in-an-3ggdvbn4ex.pdf

A Multidisciplinary Engineering Summer School in an Industrial Setting.

The main goal of this research was to create the flexible software required for defining capabilities for any manufacturing system and saving them in computer memory. It is needed to create knowledge bases about manufacturing process planning. Knowledge bases and the manufacturing system formalised description are necessary to build CAPP system, which generates manufacturing process plans. To solve this problem the events occurring in manufacturing system were separated and classified. Moreover the description of events that change the characteristics of the part (transformers) and their classification was presented. To record data, the relational database model was used. The algorithm for data recording was created and allows us to record data for any manufacturing system. The algorithm for defining technological capabilities was also presented. Based on the authors' research the software was created and verified on the example of the CPTOR1 system. The presented approach allows analysts to record the capabilities of any manufacturing system. 

Jacek Habel

Papers

A Multidisciplinary Engineering Summer School in an Industrial Setting.

Data base with open architecture for defining manufacturing system capabilities