Transformative but Not Easy: Students’ Experiences of an Interdisciplinary, Project-Based Capstone Course

Abstract

In this study we explored the experiences of students who completed a project-based, interdisciplinary capstone course that was offered at a large university in Southern Ontario, Canada. To do so, we interviewed students after they completed the course, adopting a constructivist perspective and a phenomenological approach. Interview transcripts were analyzed, resulting in four themes: (1) communication, (2) group dynamics, (3) successes, (4) differences between program requirements. In addition to revealing tension between fostering student autonomy and providing students with support, our findings also demonstrate that students valued the capstone course for the knowledge and experience gained from learning to work as an interdisciplinary unit rather than the tangible output of a given project.

Keywords

• capstone course
• interdisciplinary
• multidisciplinary
• collaborative learning