Abstract:

The use of collective works (called student projects) to apply theories learnt in different disciplines is a common approach in computer science. These projects encourage the implementation of concepts and also the learning of transversal knowledge and skills useful for the student’s future careers.

Due to the potential benefits of cross-domain knowledge, multidisciplinary projects are integrated into many university programs. In groups, students must then carry out a project by applying knowledge from several courses. Finally, it makes it possible to highlight and reinforce some soft skills essential to professional practice and posture. However the implementation of these projects can be seen itself as a project for all participating teachers, who have to define their roles (coach, technical expert, facilitator, …), deadlines, knowledge requirements...

This article presents feedback on the collaboration between teachers who supervise multidisciplinary projects for computer science students. The point of view taken on these projects is to consider the setting up, the monitoring and the evaluation of students as collaborative tasks whose results depend on the consideration of constraints given by the collective organization. We will support our analysis through comparing two different organizations from the pedagogical community of Grenoble University in the field of computer science. The first one is for 2nd-year students of technological university study and the topics for which teachers provide support are project management, modeling to design, HCI consideration and technical implementation. Each year, nearly 200 students carry out these multidisciplinary projects. The second studied organization is for a master's degree (5th year of computer science training). Projects mobilize knowledge on very specific aspects such as online deployment, testing and website ergonomics.

These two teaching contexts give rise to different teachers' organizations. We propose to study these differences by identifying the reasons in educational contexts. In particular, two dimensions are studied. The first one is about the temporal aspects. The steps (setting up, monitoring and evaluation) are identical in their objectives but different in their implementation. The second dimension deals with the collaboration between teachers and its management. This study carried out as a part of a IDEX (Executive Commission Education and Learning Innovation) project supported by University Grenoble Alpes. It is not intended to be exhaustive, it paints a cross portrait between two implementations of collaboration between teachers around a informatics project and shows that different teaching contexts imply adaptations of project implementations by teachers.

Keywords:

Multidisciplinarity, project-based learning, teaching.