Education for collaboration

Real life engineers find themselves in an environment of rapid and continuous change with tasks of steadily rising complexity. In order to deal with the speed of change and the complexity, the ability for collaboration seems to become an increasingly important competence in modern engineering education. This poses the question, whether the usual academic education is adequate to reach this goal and how it can be improved. When realizing the requirements from the Bologna-process that were posed to the mechatronics programme of the Department for Precision and Micro-Engineering, Engineering Physics of the Munich University of Applied Sciences, a new course was added to the curriculum that deals with collaboration in many senses. It is called “Mechatronical Integration” and takes place in the sixth semester of the undergraduate courses, i.e. it starts in the last undergraduate year. Mechatronical integration itself is a task that seems crucially based on collaboration, as integrating tasks cannot be fulfilled without the different disciplines like mechanics, electronics, software, testing, documentation and management working together in a collaborative way very closely. In this paper, we will describe the approaches to implicitly teaching to collaborate realized by this course. We will present the results gathered during the several years, the courses were held.