The project is focused on the support of international student´s cooperation in the field of technical universities, using the innovative online methods in multidisciplinary project management team. The need for generic skills (also called soft skills, transversal skills or 21st century skills) is increasing in the current world and thus more attention should, also in the curriculum level, be paid to teaching these skills and ensuring that the students acquire the competences needed in the field of e.g. communication in virtual and multicultural environments. The project aims to create and test a multidisciplinary student´s team learning model where the representative students from several universities in European Union will be involved. The students will be given an assignment from the external company and they will have to find or create a final product/solution working on-line together. The student´s project team will consist of experts in the technical, business and project management fields. The students will be taught in several fields such as intercultural awareness, language and social skills and project management in virtual teams. The team will use an online communication and apply diverse innovative (e.g. agile methods) methods in project management as well as sharing and creating knowledge which are currently used all over the world. The aim is to create a new technical subject at the cooperating universities, supporting the curricula in construction and design. Another output will be a multimodal glossary of technical terms and a guideline for teachers in multidisciplinary intercultural learning/teaching.
The need for generic skills (also called soft skills, transversal skills or 21st-century skills) increases today. More attention should (on the curriculum level) be paid to teaching entrepreneurial, foreign language and digital skills to foster employability, socio-educational and professional development through an innovative and creative solution and transdisciplinary approach. Universities are then seeking solutions involving students in international experiences and letting them acquire the skills required to work in international and virtual (remote) teams, especially communication in virtual and multicultural environments [Kolm 2021, Zuofa 2017]. Besides, participating students are expected to show increased motivation in fields like intercultural awareness, language and social skills, project management, or online communication. For that purpose, the MUPIC (multidisciplinary project in an international context) project has been developed by joining four European universities: the University of West Bohemia (CZ), Turku University of Applied Sciences (FI), University of Mons (BE) and Florida Universitaria (SP). During the project, teams composed of students with different nationalities and backgrounds (mechanical engineering, design engineering, business/marketing, and project management) worked on a real-life engineering project submitted by a company. They had to work together online as well as in a face-to-face environment. Such a real-life experiment allows students to develop competencies such as understanding cultures, virtual communication in English as a lingua franca, choice of media, collaborating in virtual teams, managing virtual projects.