Interdisciplinary Systems Thinking

The University of Oulu Graduate School will organize a new kind of course “Interdisciplinary Systems Thinking” for doctoral researchers of the University of Oulu. The course is complementary to the existing course “Scientific Research and Ethics”. There are altogether ten teachers from different disciplines: engineering, mathematics, and natural and social sciences. The course includes 29 hours of lectures and an exam and corresponds 5 ECTS credits. As a pre-assignment, the participants must read selected parts from the open access textbook M. Ramage and H. Shipp, Systems Thinkers, 2nd ed. London: Springer, 2020. The course shows how the different disciplines are converging towards similar generic system models called archetypes although the terminology is often different. The course breaks barriers between the disciplines and therefore improves our creativity in our daily work so that we can collaborate in an interdisciplinary team to solve the most complex problems of our time.