York University introduced the elective course "Disruptive Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship" in Winter 2024, Summer 2024, and Winter 2025, attracting students from diverse faculties, including engineering. This course utilized interdisciplinary teams for case study analysis and hackathon-style design sprints, providing engineering students a rare opportunity to collaborate across disciplines. This scholarship-of-teaching-and-learning (SoTL) paper investigates student experiences in these interdisciplinary teams, combining document analysis of 135 students' reflection journals with manual coding and generative AI to uncover key themes and dynamics. Students highlighted connections between course-based teamwork and real-world interdisciplinary scenarios like employment and extracurricular activities. Future research, building on these preliminary findings, aims to delve deeper into the challenges and benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration across faculties. This study contributes to defining the educational value and challenges of cross-faculty student teams, informing future initiatives aimed at enhancing interdisciplinary education within higher education settings.
Horvath et al. (Thu,) studied this question.