Active Interdisciplinary Learning in a Design Thinking Course: Going to Class for a Reason

New technologies such as MOOCs make it crucial for universities to find the added value of bringing students to campus. Designing lectures that foster more interactions could address this issue, as student engagement and interaction are harder to replicate remotely and are seen as key to acquire both disciplinary and transversal skills. In this paper we present and evaluate an example of a novel interdisciplinary course on design thinking offered at our institution, which was designed to provide such active in-class learning experience. Our results show that in-class collaborative activities, cross-team peer-to-peer feedback and interdisciplinary work was well appreciated by students, yet it still remains a challenge to find equilibrium between theory, hands-on activities and reflexivity.