1 Co-opetive Team Education and Learning: A New Paradigm for Higher Education By

An innovative and interactive educational process is being developed at the University of Washington in engineering classes using newly devised learning strategies from industry and academia combined with a unique teaching approach: integrated teams. The teams have evolved in such a way that they currently consist of professors and industry leaders as integrators and catalysts: senior graduate students and field specialists as facilitators: and full and part time students with diverse experiences and backgrounds as students. They are fused together through experiential learning and projects in which all are stakeholders and have a chance to influence its outcomes in real time. This non-traditional approach, based on “compete and collaborate ” learning principles, creates a dynamic learning environment by incorporating teaming concepts into teaching, learning, and facilitation. The evolving methodology of this alternative has been applied in several undergraduate and graduate chemical engineering classes, placing emphasis on solving engineering and business problems through teamwork—a necessary skill for succeeding in today’s workplace. The achievements of this new approach were: 1) increased student participation in the overall process, promoting a better retention of information: 2) more efficient and rapid learning of the fundamental course material: and 3) increased breadth of learning on related subject matter. The framework for this educational experience was inspired by the teaming concept system integration used by the Boeing company during the design and implementation of the Boeing 777 airplane. The current University learning processes wer