Sustainable international experience: A collaborative teaching project

Within engineering education, there is an increasing need for providing our students withinternational experiences. This is most often done by exchange studies abroad. However, amajority of the students on engineering programs do not engage in any international exchange.This paper presents insights from a collaborative cross-disciplinary international project to givestudents international experience without having to travel. From both a sustainabilityperspective and a situation where e.g. a global virus outbreak stop students from travelling,solutions that give engineering students experience of working in an international setting arebecoming increasingly important. Initial challenges, for the teachers involved in the project,that were addressed before the project started, included the assessment of students, the useof online collaborative tools, assessment of students and the dependence between the twocourses. The learnings from the first and second iteration of the collaborative project weremainly focused around transparency, introduction of students to each other, communication,real-time issues and deadlines. By gradually remove these peripheral challenges for thestudents, resulting in making the students focus on the actual challenges surrounding theactual collaborative project. Even though this project is ongoing, the initial results clearly showthat by integrating courses between different countries and disciplines, it is possible to createan environment that strengthens the students’ ability in teamwork, communication andaddresses the cultural and professional aspects of working as an engineer in an internationalcontext.