Contribution: This research paper contributes to engineering education research with a framework for interdisciplinary learning outcomes based on students’ experiences from participation in an interdisciplinary project for engineering students. A theoretical frame of reference is developed to analyze students’ experience with interdisciplinary projects. Background: Engineers are important stakeholders in solving complex global challenges, and faculties have a very important role in educating engineers with the necessary competences. However, research finds many challenges when engineering students work with complex problems in an interdisciplinary setting crossing different disciplinary boundaries. Research Question: What cognitive learning outcomes are experienced by engineering students when working on interdisciplinary problem-based projects across engineering disciplines? Methodology: The case study draws on insights from interdisciplinary projects involving students from different yet related disciplines (referred to as narrow interdisciplinary projects) in spring 2022. The study followed 18 engineering groups during the spring semester of 2022. The students were all from The Faculty of Engineering and Science and belonging to the programs: Energy, Materials & Production, and Construction. The students worked together in clusters on different narrow interdisciplinary engineering projects (leadENG). Data was collected through eight qualitative group interviews and observations from meetings, status seminars, etc. Interview data was transcribed and analyzed in NVivo using a data-driven approach and afterward categorized according to the model for learning outcomes. Findings: A list of intended learning outcomes was compiled for students working on narrow interdisciplinary problems in relation to interdisciplinary understanding, reflexivity, enactment, and coordination. The findings highlight the importance of coordination in an interdisciplinary setup and suggest more focus on student leadership in engineering education.

Contribution: This article contributes to the literature surrounding first-year engineering students’ academic well-being by proposing a conceptual framework guiding an understanding of supportive sources that foster students’ academic well-being. A survey was designed and tested accordingly, and four factors that contribute to students’ academic well-being were identified to inspire the improvement of a future course and curriculum design. Background: Prior research has pointed out that students’ academic well-being has a significant impact on their persistence in their current study, learning experience, academic achievement, and competence development. However, limited studies have explored first-year engineering students’ academic well-being and supportive factors in the field of engineering higher education. To support engineering students to become agentic professionals, it is meaningful to pay close attention to their academic well-being and help them to become purposeful learners at an early stage of their professional development. Research Question: 1) How can an instrument be developed and validated to characterize the sources of students’ academic well-being in a project-based learning approaches (PBL) context? 2) What sources could foster students’ academic well-being in a PBL context? Are there significant differences in age, gender, and discipline as a function of sources of academic well-being? Methodology: With the guidance of the conceptual framework with the domains of internal and external sources, a survey was designed based on a literature review and conducted in a PBL environment. The survey’s content validity, construct validity, and reliability were tested using expert review, a pilot study, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and Cronbach’s alpha. Findings: Supportive sources fostering students’ academic well-being were reported in the factors of personal values, agentic action, interactions within the learning environment, and external support. Comparisons between gender, age, and discipline verified the different impacts of the four factors on fostering academic well-being.

In various problem- and project-based traditions, interdisciplinarity is part of the definition, and there have been a few conceptualizations of interdisciplinary projects. However, with the increasing application of interdisciplinary projects, it is necessary to develop a more varied understanding. A recent study in a PBL context defines four interdisciplinary project types, and this article aims to develop a conceptual understanding that can inform the design of project types. To design interdisciplinary project collaboration, it is necessary to understand the characteristics of the disciplines involved. In the literature, we identified three major dimensions: knowledge, culture, and approach to learning, all of which play a role in the understanding of problems and collaboration. Furthermore, it is important to understand the move from the disciplinary to the more interdisciplinary project types. In this regard, problem design and team collaboration are chosen areas to exemplify the complexity of this move. As an outcome of this paper, a conceptual framework is developed combining the three dimensions of disciplinary understanding with the interdisciplinary project types. This creates an understanding of what to take into consideration in a design process moving from disciplinary to interdisciplinary projects, especially in the design of problems and interdisciplinary project collaboration.

Engineers are important participants in solving societal, environmental and technical problems. However, due to an increasing complexity in relation to these problems new interdisciplinary competences are needed in engineering. Instead of students working with monodisciplinary problems, a situation where students work with authentic complex problems in interdisciplinary teams together with a company may scaffold development of new competences. The question is: What are the challenges for students structuring the work on authentic interdisciplinary problems? This study explores a three-day event where 7 students from Aalborg University (AAU) from four different faculties and one student from University College North Denmark (UCN), (6th-10th semester), worked in two groups at a large Danish company, solving authentic complex problems. The event was structured as a Hackathon where the students for three days worked with problem identification, problem analysis and finalizing with a pitch competition presenting their findings. During the event the students had workshops to support the work and they had the opportunity to use employees from the company as facilitators. It was an extracurricular activity during the summer holiday season. The methodology used for data collection was qualitative both in terms of observations and participants’ reflection reports. The students were observed during the whole event. Findings from this part of a larger study indicated, that students experience inability to transfer and transform project competences from their previous disciplinary experiences to an interdisciplinary setting.

This workshop introduces a framework to integrate PBL competences in the curriculum. Based on a short introduction to the framework used at the engineering and science faculties at Aalborg University, we invite participants into sub-groups to construct learning outcomes. Participants will use a tool developed for this purpose, presenting a set of dialogue cards including four types

Interdisciplinary collaboration in engineering education: Anette Kolmos, Jette Egelund Holgaard, and Henrik Worm Routhe from Aalborg University discuss findings from the InterPBL research project and highlight the advantages of interdisciplinary collaboration in engineering education. Sustainability and climate issues can only be understood and resolved through interdisciplinary collaboration across various disciplines. Technological solutions are system-oriented, necessitating extensive collaboration between stakeholders from academia and society. As a result, it is critical that engineering students gain experience and knowledge of cross-disciplinary collaboration. However, interdisciplinary collaboration across disciplinary boundaries is extremely difficult. InterPBL, a research project at Aalborg University funded by the Grundfos Foundation, seeks to improve interdisciplinary collaboration in engineering education. In the InterPBL project, we discovered that the approach to interdisciplinary projects was overly simplistic due to a lack of understanding of the various forms that interdisciplinary projects can take. A framework was created based on empirical data, with six categories of disciplinary and interdisciplinary problem-based projects. These are defined by two dimensions: the type of knowledge, which ranges from disciplines to narrow and broad interdisciplinary problems. Figure 1 illustrates the project collaboration pattern, which ranges from single project teams to multi-teams with multiple student teams working together.