ide3a - A Multidisciplinary and International Education Platform on Interconnected Urban Critical Infrastructure Systems Under Review

The interplay of urbanization and climate change is increasing the strain on aging urban critical infrastructure systems and generate multi-faceted technical, social, and environmental challenges. Education programs should prepare early career researchers and students alike to tackle these challenges by enriching their transdisciplinary knowledge, fostering critical system thinking, and training them to work across disciplines.

The international alliance for digital e-learning, e-mobility and e-research in academia (ide3a) is an ongoing project that achieves this goal by offering a multidisciplinary and international research and education program to the next generation of graduates and researchers. With a portfolio of virtual and blended-learning teaching units and different teaching formats (lecture series, short courses, and hackathons) master students from six higher education institutions in Germany, Italy, Ireland, Norway, and Poland are trained on topics related to interconnected urban critical infrastructure systems. With a research-based education approach, a team of senior and early-stage researchers with a background in water management, mobility, energy, IT systems, urban planning, and sustainability is jointly shaping the ide3a content and its digital learning tools, including an open-source simulation-based serious game that integrates multi-sectoral models of interconnected critical infrastructure systems.

In this work, we wrap up outcomes and lessons learned from the past two-and-a-half years of the ide3a program - which started in 2020 and is running until March 2023 - with an emphasis on the following questions: How has ide3a created a living lab for multidisciplinary, international, and digital research and education on critical infrastructures and digitalization? Which effects did the pandemic have on the implementation of ide3a? What are the lessons learned and recommendations for the future of multidisciplinary and international education?