PRISMA platform builds on four pillars

ETH Zürich provides a first-class technical education. (1) In addition, the university also wants to teach method-specific, personal, and social skills to its students to prepare them as well as possible for the future. However, according to many students, these soft skills are less well-represented in ETHZ’s education, especially at Bachelor’s level. (2) Moreover, most individual courses at ETHZ focus, understandably, on a specific topic within a specific study program. A consequence of this is that ETH Zürich’s alumni are skilled specialists but are not as well-prepared to work together with professionals from disciplines other than their own. This is the so-called silos problem.

These two weak points of ETHZ’s education motivated the PRISMA project – previously called ROSE. By developing a platform for engagement, teaching, and learning, PRISMA provides an environment for students to develop multidisciplinary teamwork skills on top of their otherwise technical education at ETH Zürich.

The PRISMA platform builds on four pillars (Sprinkles, Community, Coaching, and Course), that operate at different stages of the studies and complement each other, fostering multidisciplinary collaboration continuously throughout the study time at ETH. Without adding complexity to the Basisjahr, PRISMA begins integrating small ‘sprinkles’ into fundamental Bachelor level lectures that highlight the importance of being open-minded towards other disciplines and connecting learnings to practical applications. The Community sustains the initial interest generated by the Sprinkles, by bringing together students from different study programs in networking events and by signaling initiatives that build on similar principles (e.g. ETH Week, SPH). Finally, the Capstone Course offers the space for BSc students to deepen critical, multidisciplinary skills and apply them to a specific problem. Students who participated in the course are encouraged to join the Coaching training in the upcoming semester. This closes the loop and makes the PRISMA platform easy to scale.

Since it was founded, PRISMA has remained student-driven. For instance, the PRISMA Capstone course is supervised by a lecturer but run mainly by trained MSc student coaches. We say that PRISMA is “From students, for students.”

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, an interactive course like the PRISMA Capstone course could not be offered in spring 2020 as planned. Therefore, the first iteration of the course took place in autumn 2020 and hosted a smaller number of students than intended: 16 compared to 36. Consequently, the second iteration of the course was also shifted back by one semester (to spring 2021) and hosted 79 students instead of the planned 90 students. The third iteration will take place in spring 2022 and we aim to scale the course up further to reach 150 students, as was planned for the third pilot phase.

Another goal for the third pilot phase was to integrate the Capstone course into 3-4 additional study programs. We managed to get two more study programs on board: Environmental Sciences and Agricultural Sciences. The course is likely to be recognized in the Physics study program as well soon. Also, the PRISMA Capstone course is planned to be a mandatory course for a future D-MTEC minor. In short, while the pandemic forced us to stretch the pilot phase in time, we are on track to (almost) meet the goals stated in the Innovedum proposal within the original budget.

PRISMA originally intended to develop a course only. However, it became clear that scalability cannot be achieved within a single course. Hence, the project was redesigned to leverage the journey that all students undertake once they join ETH, to achieve maximum visibility and impact with minimal disruption of the existing curricula. PRISMA, therefore, launched three further projects that were not part of the initial proposal (Sprinkles, Community, and Coaching) that complement the course and guarantee its scalability.

Multidisciplinary work requires tackling students from different departments. Currently, PRISMA is present in 15 out of 16 departments at different intensity levels. To date, PRISMA has reached a considerable number of students: 66 Master level students from 11 different departments have been trained to become PRISMA-certified coaches, 95 Bachelor level students from 7 different departments have completed the PRISMA Capstone course, almost 2’500 Bachelor level students from 9 different departments have had a sprinkled lecture, and more than 2’500 students from 15 different departments have participated at least in one of our Community events. We used a series of surveys to measure PRISMA’s impact on student learning. We received highly positive feedback and observed a high student engagement.

• PRISMA – Course platform
• Learning & Teaching Fair 2020