Promoting transdisciplinary collaboration in a multi-stakeholder CBL
Project introduction and background information
The Circular Electronics project brings students into the heart of a real sustainability challenge: the growing global problem of electronic waste. In this course, part of TU/e’s multidisciplinary CBL course, second‑year students from eight majors step into the role of challenge owners, shaping their own research questions while working with companies, NGOs, and academic experts. The first run of the course in 2025 showed that students were engaging across disciplines and with stakeholders in meaningful ways, but it also raised new questions about how transdisciplinary learning actually develops in such open‑ended environments.
Since clear guidelines for designing this type of learning are still lacking, this project aims to study the emerging interactions more deeply - looking at students’ learning gains, the social networks they form, and how their motivation evolves. These insights will support a redesign of the course and lead to practical guidelines for fostering transdisciplinary learning in CBL, contributing to TU/e’s vision of flexible, self‑directed, and societally connected education.
Objective and expected outcomes
- Understanding how the current course design supports transdisciplinary learning: the project investigates how students engage with a complex sustainability challenge. It examines how effectively the course structure - built around openness, stakeholder collaboration, and design‑thinking processes - enables students to integrate knowledge across disciplines and work toward transdisciplinary outcomes.
- Analyzing interactions among students, teachers, and societal stakeholders: by using tools such as Social Network Analysis interviews, Learning Gains Q‑method, and motivation surveys, the project explores how different actors contribute to co‑creation. It aims to reveal how stakeholder roles, teacher facilitation, and student autonomy shape learning, collaboration, and motivation in an open‑ended CBL environment. These insights will clarify which elements of the ecosystem strengthen or hinder productive learning dynamics.
- Developing evidence‑based guidelines and redesigning the course: findings from the pilot and the next course run will inform a refined course design for 2026-27. The project will produce guidelines for enabling transdisciplinary learning in CBL, benefiting not only this course but also broader educational innovation efforts at TU/e and across alliances such as 4TU and EWUU. These guidelines will be disseminated through institutional platforms, newsletters, and academic channels to support future scaling and adoption.