Interdisciplinarity in Engineering Education

Henrik Worm Routhe, Anette Kolmos, Jette Egelund Holgaard (Aalborg University, Denmark)

Still more and more engineers are facing Ill structured and wicked problems. Problems that may be hard to define. Industry and society expect that engineers can take an active part, not only solving the problems, but most importantly, also be able to define and understand the whole context and the problems. Engineers need not only solve others’ problems; indeed, they need to participate in the formulation of the problems. Because many of these problems cannot be solved within disciplinary boundaries, it becomes crucial that engineers have the competences to collaborate with other professions and work across the disciplinary boundaries. For engineering education, it means change and reshaping. A change or a reshaping of engineering education, moving away from the disciplinary approach towards an interdisciplinary setting. 

With point of departure at Aalborg University, where problem- and project-based learning is the pedagogical model, students are used to identify, analyze and solve problems in projects, organized in disciplinary teams. To qualify the discussion of interdisciplinarity, different project types and different organizations a model has been described. A model introducing six different categories, see Figure 1.

These six different categories illustrate the variation and different project types, which reflect the need from industry, where generic competences, personal attitudes and values combined with disciplinary knowledge constitutes the future engineer.