Food Microbiology is an interdisciplinary 12.5 ETCS third semester course in a CDIO based Engineering Bachelor education in Food science at The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) which started in 2011. Each session in the Food Microbiology course consist of a theoretical part which is supported by matched laboratory exercises. The combination of theory and practices strength the students application-oriented competences and the variation maintain their engagements. One of the main teaching strategies in this Food Microbiology course is to include real engineer problems. For example the students learn about lactic acid bacteria in one session and in another session about bacteriophages. In the dairy industry, milk fermentation with lactic acid bacteria is exposed to bacteriophages that attack lactic acid bacteria and thereby destroy the product. The students try to ferment sour crème in the laboratory where one fermentation batch is added bacteriophages. The number of bacteria is enumerated during the fermentation simultaneous with measurement of pH. By this combination of knowledge and practical work the students face real problems. Including real life engineering cases is a method to motivate the students and thereby increase their learning in a course. To upgrade the real complex engineer problems, collaboration between the other third semester courses were established and interdisciplinary projects were created with Statistics, Analytical Chemistry and Food Production. Since Food Microbiology is a newly started course it is flexible for changes and adjustments this was a good opportunity to implement the CDIO principles in teaching practices. Collaboration between Statistics and Food Microbiology: The students tested two different plating methods for enumeration of the pathogen bacteria Salmonella. All the generated data for all the groups were collected and used for statistical analysis. At the Statistics course the students were testing if there were statistical differences between the two methods. Final, the students wrote a microbial and statistical report. Collaboration between Analytical Chemistry and Food Microbiology: The students identified and characterized food related molds in the laboratory. Samples were taken from selected molds and chemically analyzed for toxin production by HPLC. The HPLC data was computer analyzed by the students in the Analytical Chemistry session. Collaboration with Food Production: In the Food Production session fish from a fish farm was caught and the students sliced and vacuum packed the fish. After storage the students analyzed the fishes in Food Microbiology for natural flora and pathogens. In those projects the students face more realistic complex problems where they have to combine their knowledge from the other courses just like they will do as professional engineers in the food industry. In this paper the results from the evaluation of the course will be presented and a discussion about how the students respond to the multidisciplinary, real life projects and their effect on student learning will be carried out.
Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014
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