Multidisciplinary projects for Engineering, Business Administration and Design programs: Construction and mapping of common skills through an analysis instrument

Abstract

In Brazil the Engineering, Business Administration and Design courses have, each one of them, a list of own competences, or skills, that are established on the curricular guidelines by Ministry of Education, to be developed by students along the course. This is not a closed list, and specific competences attending specifics courses demands can be included, in order to training students with innovative and current profile. The engineering courses guidelines point out that students need to be trained with active learning strategies putting them as protagonists of their training and, besides this, courses need to make use of projects to develop the soft skills desirable in this training. To achieve an integrative approach, an institution created a new curriculum in which the students of these three courses interact in multidisciplinary projects. This approach has with bases the innovation tripod supporting the collaboration of the students of these three courses, aiming training them to a global scenario that claims professional's broad vision. Each multidisciplinary project is developed in an academic semester and the students need to enrol in two projects per semester. In this context emerged the need of a convergent list of competences that translate the competences of these three courses, without lose the essence of each one. This paper presents the process of building this unique list of competences, for training professionals with an updated and innovative profile. From this, a survey was carried out to gather information on the competences developed in these projects. The research method was the documental analysis for the creation of the list of competences. To survey the competences that are offered in the projects, a questionnaire sent to the instructors was used. The list of competences allowed the creation of an activity plan, in which they declare the competences that will be developed by students, ensuring the management of the learning process. © 2022 University of Minho. All rights reserved.