Experts in Teamwork - Business and Technology – From Silos to Synergy

Experts in Teamwork (EiT) is a master’s degree course in which students develop their interdisciplinary teamwork skills. The course is compulsory for all students in master’s programmes and programmes of professional study at NTNU.

For further information, see www.ntnu.edu/eit and www.ntnu.edu/eit/course-description

Knowledge

• Students have gained knowledge about group processes and are familiar with key concepts and prerequisites for good teamwork.
• Based on experience from the team, students can describe the prerequisites for good interdisciplinary teamwork.
• Students have insight into how their teamwork is influenced by their own behaviour patterns and attitudes, as well as those of others.

Skills

• Students can apply their academic learning in cooperation with people from other subject areas, and jointly define problems and find solutions to them.
• Students can apply fundamental group theory and concepts to describe their own specific collaborative situations.
• Students can reflect on their teamwork and analyse the way that the group communicates, plans, decides, accomplishes tasks, handles disagreements and relates to professional, social and personal challenges.
• Students can provide feedback to the individual team member and to the team as a whole and can reflect on feedback from the team.
• Students can take initiatives (actions) that encourage cooperation, and they can contribute to changing patterns of interaction to create more productive, constructive and social collaboration in a group.

General competence

• Students have extended their perspective on their own specialized knowledge in their encounter with skills from other disciplines. They can communicate and apply skills they have developed in their own field in collaboration with students from other disciplines.
• Students can collaborate with people from other disciplines, and they can contribute to realizing the potential of their combined interdisciplinary expertise.

Teaching consists of both teacher- and student-led activities. At the beginning, activities are arranged to introduce the students to each other. The village theme is presented to the students, who draw up a cooperation agreement in the team. The student team prepares a proposal for their project based on the village theme and the individual student’s academic competence and interests. After approval by the village supervisor, the student team works with the project throughout the semester.

The student team is responsible for following up the cooperation agreement and for revising it if necessary. The teams are facilitated during their project work. Facilitation is an important part of the methodology. Student assistants intervene and pose questions to the team based on observations of incidents or patterns collaboration in the team.

Students write both personal reflections and team reflection notes. These reflection writing provides the teams with content for the process report.

Compulsory assignments

• Attendance is compulsory.
• Preparation of a cooperation agreement between the members of the student team during the first two village days.
• Oral presentation of the project and a dialogue about the teamwork in the student team when the teaching ends.

The compulsory activities must be approved by the village supervisor before the final reports are submitted for assessment. Participation by the entire student team is a prerequisite.

Final reports

These consist of a project report and a process report. The project report must describe the student team’s problem formulation and the result of the project work. The process report must describe the collaboration in the team and what the individual has experienced and learnt through shared reflection on relevant situations from the project teamwork. Expectations for the student team’s work and criteria for the evaluation are described in the Guide for Students: Experts in Teamwork.