Abstract:

In the last few years a new phenomenon entered to the universities curricula – multidisciplinarity. Dynamic expansion of technologies as well as other knowledge from all parts of education, combined with globalizing markets, created a demand of new experts, who would have deep education in one specific branch, but also would be able to understand the problems and main concept of one or more others.
Faculty of informatics created 5 years ago the new study program “Service Science, Management and Engineering” (SSME). It reflected the idea, presented by IBM – the new way in IT education - Service Science. The main focus was to “create” a new design of the graduates, the T-shape professionals, who have deep knowledge of information technologies, but also a lot of other soft skills (business, project management, communication, and marketing). Very soon it was obvious that creating this multidisciplinary program is more complex problem.
There was also problem of the length of the internship – about whole semester. The main reasons for such a long internship were following:
• The confrontation of the school learned knowledge with the reality
• To learn a new information and procedures on student's fields of study
• To bring the effect for the partner
The number of the partners successfully grew from 2-4, situated in Brno at the very beginning to more than 50, spread not only throughout the Czech republic, abut also throughout the other countries. It was necessary to take care about successful cooperation with this rapidly increasing number of the partners.
The first version of study program faced to many unexpected problems, mostly connected with the total different conception of the program. There are well known credit limitations (120 ETCS for whole master study), the structure of the study program was created in more flexible way than the others. The main assumption that the students got main IT skills during their bachelor studies and the master program should concentrate to improve their other knowledge seemed to be very logical. But combined with the absence of entering tests the results were very stunning:
• Students were able to pass the program without really good knowledge of IT (mostly the students coming from non-IT faculties)
• No-one was able to specify the right mandatory courses of soft skills
• The topics of the first diploma thesis were out from the IT area
• Partners were not satisfied with the knowledge of the students
• In courses, simply taken from the other faculties or departments students faced to the different level of prerequisites
As the reaction of those facts the structure of the program was recreated. Also was necessary to build new lectures and rules, especially focused to programing skills, management, marketing and economics and finance, mentioning the different entrance level of the student’s knowledge. All this process was consulted with our internship partners.
More than 5-years’ experience with developing and keeping about the international multidisciplinary program, with strong connection to the business reality, created very huge base of knowledge about inter and multi-disciplinary relations, that we would like to offer for sharing. We began with 16 students, now the SSME program is studied by more than 220 students. Multidisciplinarity is undoubtedly future of the university degree, but often it is not well perceived. The article main goal is to help with it.

Keywords:

Multidisciplinarity, service science, internship.