On Measurement of Multidisciplinarity Index in Engineering Education

Although there have been lots of theoretical, empirical studies delved into the issue of technological convergence across industries with examining the measurement of the degree of such convergence, studies explored or exploring the concept of interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary convergence in disciplines of university are relatively few. Therefore, developing an indicator or index enabling the measurement of the degree of multidisciplinarity of educational courses in university would be the starting point toward theoretical or empirical studies on the pedagogy of university particularly facing the situation for students especially participating in capstone courses provided by engineering colleges in need of multidisciplinary knowledge for them to solve their real problems. Based on the existing studies examined indicators of technological convergence, we define the multidisciplinarity of the capstone design project team as integration of variety, balance, and disparity of disciplines and then propose the index enabling the measurement of the degree of multidisciplinarity. In addition, the index for the capstone design project team in industrial engineering is identified to present the applicability thereof in current capstone courses.