interdisciplinary design class, each decision is made by multiple lead faculties, which have their own perspective, methodology, assessment type, teaching and learning styles. Thus, the decisionmaking becomes more complex and requires significantly longer time.
At the early stage of a project, instructors from each discipline gather to discuss and set the scope of the problem that students will be solving. This is a crucial part of any selected project which includes different faculties that are relevant to the learning outcomes.
However, the efforts to collaborate with other faculties in an interdisciplinary capstone project are continuing and appear to be increasing in number. Although these project types often require heavy faculty commitment. Todd et al. [ 36 ] agreed that an interdisciplinary capstone design project is very valuable in helping students to be prepared for their chosen profession. In order to reduce workloads for educators involved in the project, a list of job descriptions for each represented faculty can be done to make the process and decisionmaking more efficient.
Conclusion
An interview session with Ir. Assoc. Prof. Abdul Aziz Omar, Director of Engineering Accreditation Department, BEM concluded that there are positive feedback to an interdisciplinary capstone design project as it reflects real working experiences and environments for engineering students. Hopefully, the issues and challenges discussed here would give some general ideas for implementing an interdisciplinary capstone design project in engineering faculties in Malaysia. We regret any oversight or omission of relevant articles throughout the article.
Acknowledgement The authors would like to thank the Director of Engineering Accreditation Department, Board of Engineers, Ir. Assoc. Prof. Abdul Aziz Omar for providing his opinions, ideas and experiences during the interview session. The authors also would like to thank Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia for the financial support through Grant AP-2015-015.
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