Collaboration between courses in the interdisciplinary course Food Microbiology

Food Microbiology is an interdisciplinary 12.5 ETCS second-year) course in a CDIO-based Bachelor of Engineering program in Food Science at The Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The course was first offered in 2011. Each session in the Food Microbiology course combines theory and practice in order to strengthen the students’ application-oriented competences and engagement. In this paper the results from the evaluation of the course will be presented and a discussion will be carried out about how the students responded to the multidisciplinary, real-life projects and how it affects student learning. The aims of this study were to test 1) the students’ perception combining theory with small laboratory exercises and 2) the students’ perception of how the course collaborates with and combines theories and practices from other current semester courses. The students evaluated the course in general using the Course Experience Questionnaire (Ramsden, 1991) and by answering a questionnaire concerning the collaboration between the other courses. It can be concluded that the combination of: theory/laboratory exercises/report writing stimulated the students’ motivation and that collaboration between other mandatory semester courses mainly was rated positively by the students.