Multi-disciplinary Learning through a Database Development Project

Recently, there are many good examples of how multi-disciplinary learning can support students to learn collaboratively and not solely focus on a single professional sector. During the Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 semesters, we have attempted to gather students studying different professional domains together. Students from the Department of Computing (COMP) and the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) are involved as partners and team members to work on joint student projects. One group of SHTM students is planning a conference event in 2012 with over 300 guests. These students act as the clients who require a banquet management system as well as a delegates managing application. Another group of SHTM students is to manage the development projects with the support of IT consultants who are in fact the COMP students. During the Fall semester, different communication channels have been set up to facilitate the inter-group and intragroup communications with the support offered by an e-learning system, Blackboard. Furthermore, there are classroom presentations given by the SHTM students and prototype demonstrations prepared by the COMP students. Pre-project and post-project questionnaires have been given to all participating students in order to assess their gain in professional and business knowledge in 2 different areas, namely database application development and conference management. During the Spring semester, another group of COMP students continued the development and made the 2 systems available on the Web. The two systems were used in a real conference and have received many positive feedbacks. In this paper, we would like to report the group dynamics of our students, achievement and difficulties encountered in this multi-disciplinary project.