Know Your Role! Defining Faculty and External Stakeholder Roles in a Multidisciplinary Capstone Course

This paper describes our development of novel faculty roles and our method for the planning and execution of projects in our year-long, multidisciplinary capstone experience. Well-defined roles permit management of increasingly complex multidisciplinary and multidepartment projects, prevent duplication of effort, and help ensure an enriching and rewarding student experience. These roles have enabled us to offer an unprecedented variety and scope of projects with an average of seven students per team from as many as six different majors and four different departments. We discuss difficulties that developed as the course grew and evolved and how the definition of roles and inter-program communication helped mitigate the challenges that arose throughout the process. We suggest that these roles might be incorporated into typical capstone project courses at other universities.