Learning to design an information system in an interdisciplinary teaching situation

International audienceThis work has been done by crossing two research fields: educational studies and industrial engineering. This paper focuses on a case study of an interdisciplinary teaching which is part of a graduate vocational training (bachelor level). The defined pedagogical sequence aims at improving the students' capacity to reuse some knowledge in the domains of Information System and Operations management that they learnt in different previous teaching modules. We analyse the content and the organisation of the sequence, the students' activity and difficulties and the teacher's role during the class meetings by using the activity theory. The results show that students can easily transfer knowledge from their company, but have great difficulties to apply concepts and methods coming from teaching modules to solve the problem. Our interpretation of the students' difficulties is the following: what is difficult is not transferring previous knowledge, but developing a reflexive attitude in order to modify or to adapt knowledge to the new situation. At the end of this paper, we suggest some pedagogical ways to help student also discuss the differences of interpretation between the two theories, as some complementary or contradictory points of view on transfer of learnin