Learning by Facilitating: A Project-Based Interdisciplinary Approach

Teamwork skills are an important part of business school curriculum typically taught using project-based experiential methods. This paper presents best practices for teaching teamwork skills to Gen Z students using a project-based learning, peer mentoring approach. With experiential learning theory as a guide, an interdisciplinary process was developed between an introductory programming course and a capstone business project management course to improve experiential learning and overcome issues like the free-rider problem. The opinions and sentiments of peer mentors were examined using text analysis and sentiment analysis. Peer mentoring between two interdisciplinary courses was found to reduce the free-rider problem and was beneficial for both classes.