Global product development: Project-based multidisciplinary joint course

Over three years 2016-2019, four top universities in Asia joined hands in offering a truly collaborative course ~ Global Product Development (GPD). Leveraging modern teaching tools to overcome geographical and cultural separations, the joint course provided unique learning opportunities for 180 undergraduate students. The high-level course objective was to prepare students to face future global challenges by providing the project-based experiential learning opportunity in developing a human-centred product from early conceptualisation to deployment. Lean product development cycle is used as a guide to help student teams in bringing to potential users a Minimum Viable Prototype (MVP) in the shortest time and at lowest cost. Students work in multidisciplinary and multicultural teams to iterate through (a) seeking and defining a global design problem, (b) developing the engineering design alternatives to solve it, and (c) building prototypes of different levels of fidelity to support the product development. Within the span of a 15-week semester, the project teams learnt from real-time video-streamed lectures, collaborated through different online tools, and worked and presented during 3 face-to-face meeting opportunities at the three campuses. Strategic milestones and checkpoints are embedded to maximise project learning and allowed flexible yet accountable assessment mechanisms. In this paper, we will share the iterative course design, the three parties’ contributions, effective online tools used to manage students’ communications and progress, and the challenges and rewards in the joint venture. Finally, a start-up success will be discussed in the paper to illustrate distinctive impact of the joint course.