Eksperter i team (EiT) - Experts in Teamwork (EiT)

Academic responsibility: Hanne Rustad

Responsible unit: Experts in Teamwork Academic Section, Faculty of Economics and Management

The course teacher (village supervisor) and theme for each course (village) are presented on the websites:
www.ntnu.no/eit (Norwegian) and www.ntnu.edu/eit ( English)

Level of study: Second-degree (master’s) level

Credits: 7.5 ECTS

Taught only in the spring semester

Assessment system: Assessment of components

Content

Good responses to difficult challenges often require cooperation across disciplines. A growing number of enterprises organize their work in interdisciplinary teams to meet this need. However, differences and disagreements occur in all teamwork. This is especially true of interdisciplinary teams, where team members have backgrounds from different disciplines and experience with different working methods. Unlocking the resource potential of teamwork across different disciplines requires handling disagreements and differences to ensure that the team works well. Interdisciplinary teamwork thus demands good teamwork skills. In the Experts in Teamwork course, students develop these skills through working on an interdisciplinary project in teams together with students from a variety of study programmes. There is a strong focus on students’ reflections on specific teamwork situations that occur as the project progresses. Topics for the student teams’ projects are based on relevant issues from civic and working life. The course creates a basis for applying the results of the work that the teams have done and putting them into practice.

For more information about the academic content and framework for the course, see www.ntnu.edu/eit.

Learning outcomes

Knowledge

• The student has gained practical and theoretical knowledge about group processes and is familiar with key concepts and prerequisites for good teamwork.
• Based on experience from the team, the student can describe the prerequisites for good interdisciplinary teamwork.
• The student has insight into how teamwork is influenced by their own behaviour patterns and attitudes, as well as those of others.
• The student has insight into how work on the group process is integrated into and influences the project work and project results.

Skills

• The student can apply their academic learning in cooperation with people from other subject areas, and jointly define problems and develop solutions to them.
• The student can apply fundamental group theory and concepts to describe their own specific collaborative situations.
• The student can reflect on and analyse the way that the team communicates, plans, decides, accomplishes tasks, handles disagreements, and relates to professional, relational and personal challenges, including their own role in this cooperation.
• The student can give and receive constructive feedback, at both the individual and the team level, in terms of how team members’ patterns of behaviour and approaches to situations contribute to the teamwork, and can reflect on such feedback.
• The student can take initiatives (actions) that encourage cooperation and can contribute to improving their teamwork.

General competence

• The student has extended their perspective on their own specialized knowledge in their interaction with competence from other disciplines.
• The student can communicate and apply their academic competence in cooperation with students from other disciplines. 
• The student can help the team to apply its shared interdisciplinary competence to achieve shared goals.

Learning methods and activities

Teaching in EiT takes place in courses (villages), normally with 5-6 student teams. The pedagogical platform is experiential learning and the approach to learning is project-based. Most of the activities in the course take place in the student teams. The teams carry out an interdisciplinary project from idea to completion, where the focus of the project must be within the theme for the course (the village theme). Reflection on their cooperation along the way plays a key role; students are challenged to explore their own and others’ behavioural patterns and attitudes in the team and to analyse how the team communicates, plans, decides, accomplishes tasks, handles disagreements and relates to professional, relational and personal challenges. This takes place through written and oral reflections and structured teamwork exercises carried out by the teams, as well as in dialogues with the teaching staff (the course lecturer and learning assistants). The teams are observed as they work, and the observations are shared with the individual team. This provides the basis for reflection and learning from their teamwork.

The different courses (villages) may have varying degrees of online cooperation, from “virtual villages”, where all the village days take place online, to “physical villages”, where all the village days take place in person. If students have chosen a virtual village, they must take part using both a camera and a microphone.

Compulsory activities

• Compulsory attendance and a requirement for 80 % attendance of the course.
  • Compulsory participation on the first or second day of the village because the team members will prepare the team’s cooperation agreement.
  • Compulsory participation in the perspective dialogue.
  • Compulsory participation in the team’s oral presentation(s) of its project (see details below).
• Cooperation agreement: Prepared by the team during the first two days of the village.
• Perspective dialogue: Students participate in a dialogue about the teamwork in the student team when the teaching ends.
• Oral presentation: The student teams must give an oral presentation of the project.
  • For villages with a project report as a basis for component assessment, this takes place on the last village day.
  • Villages with an oral project presentation as a basis for component assessment will conduct two presentations in total: The first as a compulsory activity about midway during the teaching period and the second as a final presentation forming the basis for an assessment component on the last village day. 
     

The compulsory activities must be approved by the course teacher before the final work is delivered for grading. The whole student team must participate in the compulsory activities - this is a prerequisite.

Attendance in intensive villages means every working day (Monday–Friday) for three weeks in January, and in semester-based villages every Wednesday during the period January–April.

For the student teams to develop teamwork skills, a significant part of their cooperation must take place synchronously, whether the students meet in person or virtually.  For this reason, there is compulsory attendance in the villages during the specified village hours (normally 08.00–16.00).

More about assessment

The student team’s final work consists of two component assessments that are weighted equally.  Each component is assessed according to the grading scale A–F. The team receives one common grade.

The final work consists of two parts, a project part and a process report. The project part is either a written report or an oral examination. The form of assessment (written or oral project part) for the different EiT courses is shown in the course description and village description for each course. The village description for the individual villages is available at www.ntnu.edu/eit.

Expectations for the student team’s work and criteria for assessment are made available at the start of the semester.

The project part is worth 50 % and the process report is worth 50 % of the final grade. 

In the event of a “fail” grade or a resit of a passed examination, the entire course must be repeated. 

Required previous knowledge

Admission to EiT requires admission to a master’s programme in which EiT is included.  Other students may apply for admission to EiT, but they must be qualified for admission to a master’s programme in order to participate.

Course materials

The material will be made available at the start of the semester.

Approved by Rector as the governing body for EiT.