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Launching Transdisciplinary Design Experience to Prepare Students for the Future of Jobs.

The rapid technological change and convergence in the globally competitive economy are causing current and future upheaval in job markets. A paradigm shift in engineering education is required in response to these job market uncertainties to mitigate unemployment and prepare engineers to tackle problems requiring a convergence of disciplines. Individuals may have to change career paths more than one time in their lifetime. However, a fast transition is not practically possible. To be competitive in professional life, undergraduate engineering students will need to have a novel set of skills and talent centered around creativity, innovation, and system integration.

The goal of transdisciplinary training is to improve students' understanding of complex issues by obtaining the valuable aspects of typical academic disciplines combining with non-academic expertise and thus generate both a more integrative and comprehensive solution to support an issue of importance to society. Transdisciplinary methods offer an approach that synthesizes methodologies from multiple fields and a broad and integrative viewpoint. The implementation of TD approaches in undergraduate education prepares future engineers and business students to tackle complex challenges by including all types of knowledge about an idea, issue, or subject through TD thinking. Transdisciplinarity practice has been considered a crucial factor for graduating engineering students’ success, for the following reasons:

1. Students learn how to identify, decompose, and solve complex problems,
2. Students learn how to consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal issues,
3. Students learn how to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative and inclusive environment to meet objectives, and
4. Students learn how to create and apply new knowledge for the solution of complex problems that benefit society.

The above students’ learning experiences are representative of four out of seven ABET 2020 Criterion 3, student outcomes. This innovative hands-on and project-based learning provides transformative learning processes that enable the integration of knowledge, methods, and expertise from different disciplines through convergence research across diverse perspectives to prepare students for tomorrow's opportunities and challenges, both in academic and non-academic careers in the private and public sectors. Transdisciplinary educational strategies will maximize available opportunities to capitalize on transformational trends.

SIGNIFICANCE

Although the past decade has seen growing interest and investment in TD graduate education, undergraduate education remains predominantly dependent upon narrow, disciplinary foci. To prepare students to become well-trained professionals, engineering programs must start integrating TD courses into the undergraduate curriculum. Although researchers have become accustomed to working across disciplinary boundaries, the undergraduate classes offered by many universities have been the same for decades. Undergraduate students should master TD competencies and begin the process of becoming transdisciplinarians before they go on to graduate studies or start working.

ALTERNATIVE

This course can also be used as TD Graduate Class for training in science, engineering, and business which will bring many students from diverse disciplines to work in research groups on collaborative and convergent projects. This holistic training program integrates research, teaching, learning, outreach, and community engagement. Graduate-level experiences should foster rich and deep TD learning that gives students opportunities to develop TD skills and competencies in (The National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine, May 23, 2017 Report):

1. developing the intellectual capacity to deal with complex problems,
2. building confidence, strong communication and self-management skills, and willingness to approach problems from multiple perspectives,
3. networking among group members and teams, joint work activities and shared decision making, leadership tasks,
4. strengthening abilities to communicate with scientists from other disciplines,
5. developing abilities to make decisions in the face of uncertainty (reflective judgment),
6. helping to understand the strengths and limitations of different disciplinary perspectives.

GOALS

• To teach students new skills aimed at creativity, innovation, and working across knowledge fields to achieve measurable effects on major social complex issues.
• To teach an approach that synthesizes methodologies from multiple fields; teaches the ability to collaborate across multiple spheres of knowledge and practice; prepares students to design, develop, and deliver a system that qualifies a student to be workforce ready, therefore creating a head-start on their career.

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