A Multidisciplinary Approach to Learning Through Real-World Problem Solving.

During my Teaching Excellence Program (TEP) at Humber College, I was required to complete a Leadership project. My Leadership project, I linked some of my experience with my Educational project. I wrote an article "A Multidisciplinary Approach to Learning Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Through Real-World Problem Solving—The BUSA Dig" that was published in the Special Issue on HRI Education. In short, the focus was taking students from different backgrounds and fields and getting them to work together on projects. The goal was to provide an authentic simulation of situations students will experience after graduation.

There were numerous initiatives that I wanted to explore with the MMDD program as a way to get students to experience multidisciplinary projects.

The first initiative was to attempt to have international student projects and exchanges embedded into the MMDD program. The goal was to have students from other countries visit and work with Humber students and also give Humber students an opportunity to travel abroad. The second initiative was to work across programs at Humber, giving students real world problems to solve. There were two projects developed for the initiatives.

The first project was an exchange with Shenzhen Polytechnic in China. I traveled with students in the MMDD and Media Communications programs to Shenzhen China from June 7th – 18th, 2018. This project was created to form more organically, where Humber students were to work with students from Shenzhen to create short films about the similarities and differences between Canadian and Chinese culture and their experiences as students. There was a language barrier that was the steepest learning curve. After meeting one another, the students used similar skills to work together on their projects.

The second project was an exchange with Lillebaelt Academy in Denmark. Forty-three students from Lillebaelt Academy came to Humber in October 2018 with their faculty. A structured project was created where students worked on a project involving dementia patients. The project started in September 2018, where students were introduced to one another via Skype. The goal was to see how they work across time zones and learning environments. All students from Lillebaelt were fluent in English, so there was not a language barrier. The project involved seven programs at Humber College in the school of Media Studies and Health Sciences. The goal was to get students from various disciplines working together and evaluate the successes and failures, and learn for future iterations.