Interdisciplinary Teams through Two Companion Courses on Infrastructure

One of the program outcome criteria for ABET accreditation is that students demonstrate “an ability to function on multidisciplinary teams” (Criterion 3(d)). Initial assessment results with respect to the effectiveness of the interdisciplinary teams were disappointing. Student peer evaluations indicated that the students in the I&S course were not engaged in the teaming experience. In this paper we present the assessment results, discuss reasons for the lack of engagement and propose improvements to the courses to enhance the learning experience for I&S students so they will be more fully engaged as interdisciplinary team members. An innovative way to meet this criterion was piloted at the University of Wisconsin—Platteville in the 2011 Fall Semester by the authors. During that semester, we taught two infrastructure-related courses. The first course, called “Introduction to Infrastructure Engineering” (I2I), was taken by civil and environmental engineering students. The second course, “Infrastructure and Society” (I&S), was offered as a social science course that fulfils the general education requirements of the university and was taken by non-civil engineering students from a variety of disciplines. Students from both courses worked together in interdisciplinary teams over the course of the semester to assess five different infrastructure components.