THE USE OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY PROJECTS AS AN EFFECTIVE STRATEGY TO PROMOTE TEAMWORK COMPETENCY

Abstract

This work describes the promotion of the teamwork's competency acquisition, in Television Production students, by their participation in a lab practice group activity. The activity simulates the real production process of a cultural audio guide, which requires the cooperation of all the group members amongst themselves, and also with groups of students from different disciplines. In this project, the degrees involved were Audiovisual Communication, Engineering, Business Administration and Tourism.

The students from Audiovisual Communication took part in the writing and recording of the audio scripts. For the development of this phase of the activity, they had to interact - both virtually and physically-with the students from other disciplines involved in the project. Some Google education applications were utilized for maximizing the collaborative work and the input tracking from all team members. For example, the students in this group received the documentation originally from the Engineering students - through google drive-and had to collaborate with the students from Tourism in composing the written scripts in google docs. To complement the online phases of the project, team members had to arrange real meetings with their counterparts in the other disciplines. As an example, students from Audiovisual Communication provided their Tourism peers with technical knowledge and facilities, in order to perform the recording of the audio tracks in three different languages. Following this experience, all groups of students filled an individual self-assessment rubric of the team work competency, acquired by their participation in this project. They also submitted an unstructured self-reflection assignment.

This experience has been used to model with the students a real life working situation, close to the professional world working practices and demanding the team work skills required outside of the campus environment. The students have been challenged to put into practice those real life group work strategies and also to be autonomous in reflecting upon their performance as team members during this activity.

The development of this project - together with its effectiveness-is analysed for each of the groups involved. Finally, we compare the reflections of the students - regarding their acquisition of the team work competency-both in this multidisciplinary practice and in other single-discipline practices of the Television Production subject.

The conclusions indicate that multidisciplinary projects can be used as an effective strategy to promote teamwork competency, during lab practices with Television Production students.