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Challenge-based learning (CBL) seeks to help students acquire skills necessary for collaborative real-world problem solving. It generally favours self-learning, in which students should seek out their own role in a problem-solving environment and choose their own set of skills to develop which are relevant to the challenge. However students from traditional degree programmes may enter with an expectation that their disciplinary expertise will count and be valued in the context of a project, but face a situation that the problem chosen by a group or the dynamics of a group render their expertise less relevant. In survey-based studies of two CBL modules, we explore the relationship between the roles students play and their levels of motivation. We find no evidence that the lack of a disciplinary role strongly affects student motivation. Rather the data suggests that if a CBL environment is properly framed around selfdevelopment and multiple potential learning goals students can relax any commitments or expectations related to their expertise, and take on different roles. This is good news for the CBL aims and goals. That said students do have a tendency to revert to disciplinary roles over the course of projects and are against their disciplinary roles being excluded when they are clearly relevant. Instructors can potentially avoid problems by having students evaluate their role choices against desired project outcomes.

Challenge-based learning (CBL) offers students in engineering programmes an opportunity to develop communicative and collaborative skills, apply disciplinary knowledge and develop boundary-crossing competencies. Mono-disciplinary approaches to CBL are generally regarded too limited, but whether multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary approaches should be used is open to discussion. Often, these concepts are used interchangeably, but there are notable differences. In literature, knowledge integration is mostly mentioned to make a distinction, but because of difficulties in applying this concept to education, we focus on tangible differences in educational practices, related to learning objectives, assessment, and the design of challenges. The different forms of CBL are illustrated by three casestudies carried out at a research university in the Netherlands. We found similarities, but also some subtle differences between multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to CBL. Multidisciplinary CBL projects are relatively pre-structured, with an indication of the knowledge that is to be applied, deepened, or combined. Interdisciplinary CBL is more open-ended, with students made responsible for connecting their disciplinary backgrounds to the project and for integrating disciplinary perspectives. Transdisciplinary CBL focuses more on impact than on integrating disciplinary contributions. Challenges are open-ended from a content and stakeholder perspective, while structure emerges in the interactions between students, teachers and stakeholders. Which form of CBL can best be employed in a course or programme is dependent on the intended learning objectives. Educators should be aware of tradeoffs and of the specific teacher competences required to design and support these different forms of CBL.