NTNU and the internationalisation of “Experts in Teamwork” through the ENHANCE Alliance
For the first time, NTNU is organising an international hybrid version of the course Experts in Teamwork (EiT) with students from Spain, Poland, and Germany through the network of the ENHANCE Alliance. The course kicked off in Trondheim, Norway, with an on-campus workshop at the beginning of February and, thanks to hybrid teaching, the students will then all participate in the same real-time teaching session but from different locations.
18 students and four employees from three member universities of the ENHANCE Alliance, TU Berlin, UPV and, WUT, participated, with more than ten nationalities represented in the group. “The students seem very motivated,” Nina Tvenge, in charge of the coordination of the course from NTNU, observed. “It will be interesting to see if everyone completes the digital part.”
If the success of this activity is already a source of satisfaction, the students will then have to complete the rest of the course digitally through online lectures and groupwork from their respective home campuses. Some of them seem ready to show some high commitment, as Nina Tvenge noticed: “One group is planning to have 30 online meetings throughout the semester!”
Working in interdisciplinary groups
While the academic content of this course is Smart Cities and Climate Action, the main objective of an EiT course is to develop interdisciplinary teamwork skills. EiT and the transdisciplinary skills it brings are considered important at NTNU, so much that it is a compulsory course for all master’s degree students.
If many students probably chose the course based on the topic, the members of NTNU organising it quickly remarked their enthusiasm, even if they had not reflected upon the interdisciplinary teamwork component before. When they were asked to stop in the middle of a process and think about what they were doing, most of the participants were fascinated.
However, if most participants were students, four staff members from Poland, Germany, and Spain also had a workshop to learn about EiT. “We want to internationalise the EiT concept so other universities in the ENHANCE network can do something similar,” Oddrun Walstad Maaø, NTNU’s ENHANCE coordinator, explained. “By organising this course, we want to inspire and give concrete advice on how to achieve this.”
Positive feedback
And even if the course is not finished yet, the feedback from the various participants regarding their stay in Trondheim has been very positive. This can be seen as an encouraging note regarding the process of internationalisation of this kind of practice. “The wintery conditions certainly helped!” Oddrun Walstad Maaø said. “The amount of snow we had was a new experience for some of them!”
The students are back in the county of their home universities, and they now have to complete their first digital workshop and other activities before the end of the course. And maybe they’ll spread the word about the new practices they learnt in Norway to help popularise this way of working.
