Developing Multi-Disciplinary Skills through a Course in Educational Software Design

Abstract

This design case covers a graduate course in educational software design that focuses on semester-long projects in response to client requests. The course was intended to address the need for professionals across disciplines, such as instructional design, computer science, and human-computer interaction design, to usefully collaborate on educational software projects. The ability to work on a multi-disciplinary team was fostered in several ways: through recruiting students across multiple majors; providing readings and student presentation topics related to language, processes, and techniques used by each discipline; and by scaffolding the work of multi-disciplinary student groups in a major semester-long project.