Here I would like to describe a real case of cross-disciplinary collaboration in the university I used to work. It would be nice if you could contribute to the analysis of the case.
This was a joint bachelor degree program between the Software Engineering (SE) School and the Department of Mathematics (Math). The university was under the pressure to promote inter-disciplinary cooperation from the Ministry of Education. So university leaders were looking for possible projects to fulfill their job duties. After some investigation on job market, several possible entry points had been found. One of them was the increased demand on professionals with strong math background and programming skills. Therefore, the university discussed with the two faculties, the Software Engineering School and the Department of Math, to see if they could work together to produce students with two strengths.
The two faculties had several meetings to discuss and produced a proposal for a joint degree program. This was a four-year undergraduate program with the first two years in Math and the last two years in SE. A new curriculum had been designed to meet the demands from industry. The intention was to let students learn more math courses than normal SE students and master more programming skills than normal Math students. From 2004, the program started to recruit students from freshmen who originally enrolled in SE or Math programs through the National College Entrance Exam.
The collaboration between faculty members was fine even though we saw very little cooperation in teaching. Seldom do they work together to make courses from two parties consistent and collaborative. Basically they just teach these students in the way they teach students in their own departments. However, the administrative staff faced many problems and difficulties due to the two different managerial systems in two departments. Math department is a traditional department which adopts typical structure of administration while SE school is a new established school with more autonomy on teaching and financial affairs. Conflicts were everywhere. For examples, teachers from Math complained that they got paid less than SE teachers while staff in SE complained that people in Math were not cooperative in course arrangement, student administration, etc. Leaders in two departments have different views and expectation on the programs.
Before the first group of students in this program graduated, people found that the good intention that trains students good at both math and programming was not realized. In 2007, the first group students encountered difficulties in finding places for internship and this meant that they would have the same problems for job hunting. Students complained that they were not good enough to compete with SE students in programming while cannot compete with Math students in computing! The outcome turned to the completely opposite direction of the planned one.
The program stopped recruiting students in 2006, two years after the launch of the program. It has not gone through any assessment to give a concrete conclusion if it was successful or failed. However, people who had involved in the joint program generally agreed that it was a failure in many aspects.
This joint program was initiated from top of the university. However, the leaders did not give any clear guidelines of working jointly. The two involved parties were not very interested in this program since they could not see many benefits (financial and non-financial) from it. The routine work which included endless disagreement and conflicts greatly reduced people’s passion and patience of working together. Finally, the outcome was not satisfied by both students and staff.
What’s wrong with this cross-disciplinary collaboration?
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The troubles of this case started out with top down decision from the top administration. It seemed rushing in without careful planning. It could started out with an ad-hoc committee to investigate whether this marriage of SE and Math will work or not. The ad-hoc committee should draft the strengths and weaknesses of offering such program. A formal discussion between the two departments and the faculties involved should take place to iron out the pros and cons and plan how to proceed further. According to the Human relation Theory in organizational management, if people were respected and given autonomy to decide the pros and cons, unity will be created. The University could nominate or appoint a chair person to head the ad-hoc committee to oversee and direct the progress of the program. Incentive should be given to the faculties for pioneering such collaborative programs to avoid dis-satisfaction from over work. Course development need to be planned and discussed by faculties involved and hopefully will justify redundancy in course material.
ReplyDeleteThis is just my thoughts off the head. More thinking needed.
Obviously, it is a problematic project without careful planning and effective operational team. I strongly believe that a good initiative for any innovation needs to have a capable and insightful intermediary acting as one of the catalysts for the optimal running mode and effective coordination skills. A project easily goes off track from time to time without strategic maintenance. However rosy the vision of the project is, the actural implementation needs much of the sophisticated study in the area of collaboration.
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