Teamwork and collaboration are twenty-first century skills valued by STEM employers for addressing the most urgent problems in society. To prepare undergraduate STEM students, they must graduate valuing teamwork and collaboration. The Integrated Concentration in STEM (iCons) program aims to meet this goal by utilizing interdisciplinary team-based…

The EPICS Program was created in 1995 with the dual purposes of improving engineering education and addressing compelling needs within our communities. The model broke with many traditional academic traditions, involving students in multidisciplinary teams of students from first-year to fourth years for multiple semesters or even years on projects…

This critical reflection briefly chronicles the transition of a general education program from a distributive model to an integrative model and the resulting Capital Capstone Course (CCC) at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC). The article describes a year long, team-based, experiential course that "caps" off our…

Purpose: This paper aims to describe how a sustainability-focused program in higher education can provide training and key experiences for implementing transdisciplinary approaches. The case is a fieldwork-based training course called the Global Field Exercise (GFE) at the Graduate Program in Sustainability Science, The University of Tokyo. The…

The engineering graduate of today will engage in a career which will span the middle of the twenty-first century, and beyond. They will work in a world which is increasingly more complex and uncertain than at any time before. This will require an integrated combination of technical knowledge and transferable skills and values, to a greater extent…

Challenges to the Arctic region abound and intersect. Warming, ice and permafrost melting, and pollution jeopardize health and food security of Indigenous and other Northern communities. Problems related to natural resource extraction and shipping are developing. Because these issues cross sovereign boundaries, they must be addressed…

Purpose: This paper aims to explain the development of an online training curriculum to enable students to acquire the transversal competences needed to work on smart cities projects. In this curriculum, a modern approach to the teaching-learning process was applied, suitable for the interdisciplinary and multinational learning challenges that…

We present a distinctive approach to knowledge exchange used in the 'Shared Space' project; an inter-disciplinary researcher-teacher partnership using Allport's contact theory contact theory as a lens to interpret teachers' self-reported practice in the subject Religion and Worldviews (RWE). By so doing, we created new professional knowledge and…

There is an increasing interest in design and creative thinking processes in the Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and health education disciplines. Many new degree programs are integrating design thinking into their syllabi, with the intention of bringing creative problem-solving methods to these disciplines. In reality,…

Universities are undertaking transformation projects that align their work with the Sustainable Development Goals. This paper describes how Ocean I3, an educational innovation project that aims to reduce plastic in the sea, has made an impact on its community over its three editions (2018/19 to 2020/21). Methodologically, it has been approached by…

Contribution: An analysis of the extent to which sustainability is present in the syllabi, project briefs, report templates, and student final reports of the three Iberian European project semester (EPS) providers, over a five-year period. Background: EPS is a one-semester capstone project framework that adopts project-based learning and…

For higher education graduates to be effective in the workplace, they require strong technical skills and the capability to operate across diverse knowledge landscapes to solve real world problems. At an Australian university, an interdisciplinary, short-term study tour programme was utilised to enhance students' inexplicit employability skills…

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-technical skills. In addition, in an increasingly globalised world collaboration in teams across cultures and disciplines is paramount to the creation…

This chapter presents a Transnational Virtual Exchange (VE) Project (TEP) developed in partnership between a Spanish and a Hungarian university. During this semester-long project, students worked in mixed virtual teams exploring selected topics related to the economics of the European Union. This report provides the details of the planning,…

The importance of reducing the gender gap in engineering programs by recruiting and retaining female students is well recognized. Although women hold roughly half of all jobs in the United States, only 24% of STEM jobs are occupied by women. The problem is even more pronounced for engineering, where women held about 12% of jobs as of 2013 (Corbett…