PELARS: A Case Study of Collaborative Working in Transdisciplinary Teams

Abstract

The intention of this chapter is to provide guidance and advice to prospective partnerships intending to carry out transdisciplinary STEAM related research. Based on the experiences of the authors during the course of a 3-year European Union (EU) funded project, it seeks to outline the benefits and challenges that arise from working in a diverse group of twelve partners drawn from academic, corporate and non-profit sectors, located across nine countries. The chapter presents the aims and outcomes of the Practice-based Experiential Learning Analytics Research and Support (PELARS) project, along with a brief outline of the funding context and attendant structural and organisational frameworks. It conveys a realistic view of both the opportunities and obstacles encountered during a project of this nature and relays useful information about establishing and maintaining effective working relationships between project partners from different disciplines, each with their own area-specific approaches and methodologies. The authors note that the topics discussed relate to their experience only and are not intended to be read as an exhaustive ‘how to’ checklist when approaching transdisciplinary research in STEAM projects or applications, but rather as a guide to highlight some of the potential issues that can be encountered on the journey and methods to address these. Our contribution operates at the edge of two main strands in this publication. On one hand it presents a research project that aims to contribute to STEAM education through technological and non-technological outputs. On the other hand, the project consortium itself is a STEAM team, combining different working methodologies at the intersection between creative design practice and design-driven research with scientific, computational and experimental approaches. The work described has been carried out as part of the PELARS project. (PELARS was classified as a smallor medium-scale focused research project (STREP) and was funded under FP7-ICT-2013-11 Objective ICT-2013.8.2, technology-enhanced learning, under the work programme objective: ICT FP7-ICT-2013.8.2-b learning analytics and educational data mining. The project was awarded in late 2013, commenced in February 2014 and lasted for 3 years, finishing at the end of January, 2017.). This research and design project seeks to understand how students learn whilst engaged in openended collaborative problem solving (CPS) tasks during practice-based learning (PBL) activities. The main aim of the project is to create a learning analytics system (LAS) and incorporate this into a specifically designed learning environment suitable for implementation in three learning contexts, second-level science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects, and third-level interaction design and engineering education.