Blended support of undergraduate interdisciplinary research

Abstract

This paper discusses blended support for undergraduate students to perform interdisciplinary research in teams. Interdisciplinary research is a complex process that consists of multiple steps and requires collaboration with people from different backgrounds. This paper presents research done at Liberal Arts and Sciences, Utrecht University (LAS), where students learn to do interdisciplinary research as part of the core curriculum. Considering the complexity of doing interdisciplinary research, it is important that students are guided in this process. Blended support that combines technologymediated guidance and face-to-face meetings would be of use to help students become more independent interdisciplinary researchers. This paper explores preferences in blended support, based on a survey and interviews with second and third year students and with undergraduate research supervisors at LAS, UU. Results indicated that there are different activities during the interdisciplinary research process where technology-mediated support would be of value. However, students and supervisors especially value meeting face-to-face when doing interdisciplinary integration. This should be taken into account when designing a blended framework for support of undergraduate interdisciplinary research.