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

Academic responsibility: Hanne Rustad

Responsible unit: Department of Experts in teams, Faculty of Economics and Management

The course teacher (village supervisor) and village theme for each 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. In all teamwork, however, there are differences and disagreements. This is reinforced in interdisciplinary teams, where members use a variety of discipline-specific languages and have experience with different working methods, among other factors. To enable a team to work well together, good collaboration skills are needed to unlock the potential that lies in interdisciplinary disagreements and differences. 

In the Experts in Teamwork course, students develop this competence 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 work progresses. The topics for the student groups' projects are based on relevant issues from civic and working life, and the aim is for the projects to be socially relevant and of value to others.

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 interdisciplinary 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 the team’s interdisciplinary composition and 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 interdisciplinary solutions to them.
• The student can apply 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) consisting of several student teams. Learning is team-based and builds on experiential learning, where the student teams work together on a common problem and at the same time analyse their own teamwork process. 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. Among other things, this takes place through written and oral reflections and structured teamwork exercises carried out by the teams. 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, everyone must take part both with their camera switched on and with a microphone available.

Compulsory activities

• Compulsory attendance and requirement for 80% attendance of the course.
  • Compulsory participation on the first or second day of the village for drawing up 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 submitted for grading. It is a prerequisite that the whole student team participates in the compulsory activities.

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 interdisciplinary 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 that includes EiT.

Course materials

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

Approved by Rector as the governing body for EiT.