Disciplines go Digital - Developing Transdisciplinary Study Programs that integrate AI with Non-IT Disciplines

The great challenges of our time and age are vastly complex and thus cannot be solved by a single discipline alone. Instead, a combination of a variety of fields is necessary. As digitalization becomes increasingly pervasive in both our personal and professional lives, IT and potentially AI skills are needed for finding appropriate solutions. Consequently, job profiles emerge that require solid skills both in a traditionally non-IT discipline as well as in IT, AI, and digitalization in general. However, university education traditionally focuses on just one discipline in its study programs. Therefore, it is high time to systematically create study programs in which different disciplines join forces, to create a truly transdisciplinary education and to foster transdisciplinary profiles. Typically, developing and operating these transdisciplinary study programs requires close cooperation of different disciplines. Although this seems to be quite obvious at first sight and easy to put into practice, experience shows that in these efforts, there lurk a variety of challenges that, if ignored, endanger the success of any transdisciplinary attempts. In this work, we try to sensitize to typical challenges involved in creating transdisciplinary study programs. We provide advice and good practices that may help to overcome typical difficulties.