Looking beyond your own speciality: student and faculty perceptions of collaboration opportunities

Abstract

This study examines engineering faculty and students’ views of collaboration beyond their own field, based on 12 engineering faculty interviews and a survey with 101 mechanical engineering students. Our analysis shows that faculty members’ views on collaboration exhibit more diversity in terms of crossing disciplinary, functional, organisational, and geographic boundaries, and they view this collaboration as more integrated into engineering work, professional practices, and problem-solving. Students, in turn, report a narrower scope of collaboration, primarily focusing on multidisciplinary collaboration to utilise engineering output. Our study helps inform engineering educators to integrate diverse collaboration more effectively with course design.