Interdisciplinarity and blended learning

Twenty-first century problems are complex as they involve interactions among many different phenomena and require interdisciplinary approaches in which insights from multiple disciplines are integrated. Though there is an urgent need for students to acquire interdisciplinary expertise, there still exist multiple barriers to achieving interdisciplinary learning outcomes in higher education. First, the segregation of academia into traditional academic disciplines makes it difficult for students to work across disciplinary boundaries. Second, in the absence of a model or framework to guide them through the interdisciplinary process, students may find it difficult to integrate disciplinary insights and achieve the more comprehensive understanding needed to address a complex problem. Third, interdisciplinary integration, which depends on higher-order thinking, creativity, and metacognition, is best served by active learning pedagogies rather than traditional or exposition-centered instructional approaches which are teacher-centered and focus on one-way transmission of information. One way to overcome these barriers is to combine interdisciplinary pedagogies with blended learning. This combined approach has two main advantages: it makes both the definition and process of interdisciplinarity clear to students while engaging them in active learning (i.e., learning in which they are actively reading, writing, or discussing, rather than passively absorbing information); and it cultivates key interdisciplinary skills such as communication, collaboration, and leadership. This chapter is about designing curricula that combine interdisciplinarity with blended learning. Several examples of this approach from both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels are provided to show that combining interdisciplinarity with blended learning is effective at helping students achieve interdisciplinary learning outcomes.