About Open Access TD Modules
Serving Students Around the World
“Generic design science, which deals with those matters that are common across the entire spectrum of design activity, and which are distinct from and overlap at most only marginally any of the disciplinary design science."
Warfield, J. N., 1994
TD modules deal with transdisciplinary integration of generic knowledge and tools for dealing with scientific and socially complex problems that exist at the interfaces of disciplinary boundaries. The knowledge learned from TD modules will help the students not only product design and development but also to solve complex problems focusing on societal needs such as environment, human health, natural disasters, sustainability, etc. The goal of TD modules is to teach students new skills aimed at creativity, innovation, and working across knowledge fields to achieve measurable effects on major social complex issues. This innovative hands-on and project-based-learning platform provides transformative learning processes that enable the integration of knowledge, methods, and expertise from different disciplines through convergence research across diverse perspectives to prepare STEAM-H and non-STEAM-H undergraduate and graduate 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.
Transdisciplinarity practice has been considered a crucial factor for graduating engineering students’ success, for the following reasons:
- Students learn how to identify, decompose, and solve complex problems,
- Students learn how to consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal issues,
- Students learn how to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative and inclusive environment to meet objectives, and
- 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. These condensed transdisciplinary training modules will provide an approach that synthesizes methodologies from multiple fields to create new knowledge and train the next generation of science, engineering, and business undergraduate and graduate students to serve the needs of society and to prepare them for the future of jobs.
