Interdisciplinary Research - a free online course for researchers

Interdisciplinarity is the topic in science. There are repeated calls - also from science policy - for scientists to work and research in an interdisciplinary way. But what does that mean for young researchers? What preconditions must be met? How can the leadership of an interdisciplinary team succeed?

An online course called "Interdisciplinary Competence” at idc.wzb.eu aims to provide answers to these and many other questions. Anna Froese, Silvio Suckow and Hendrik Woiwode have developed the online course "Interdisciplinary Competence" within the research project "Interdisciplinarity and Research Creativity". In it, interdisciplinarity and its success factors are presented in numerous learning videos structured in six modules. Participants learn everything from career strategies to competencies and knowledge transfer. The course is available in English.

The special feature is that the course was developed from the perspective of researchers who want to pass on their knowledge to colleagues interested in interdisciplinarity, including managers. For this purpose, the scientific results were translated into content that is easy to understand and entertaining even for busy scientists. The entire course can be completed self-paced on the online platform in less than six hours. The progress is saved so that the last learning unit can be continued seamlessly.

The course incorporates the results of the research project "Interdisciplinarity and Research Creativity". The aim is to explain which factors can contribute to dealing with the tension between interdisciplinary promotion and disciplinary cultures of evaluation. Across a range of disciplines, institutional arrangements and personalities, models, heuristics and success factors that have proven effective in practice have been identified from over 60 interviews with interdisciplinary scholars and research managers in Germany, the USA, the UK and Israel.

The course is available free of charge under an open access licence (CC-BY-SA 4.0) at idc.wzb.eu.

The entire team hopes you enjoy the course!

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