An intervention through teaching and learning practice to address stress and anxiety in students caused by the challenges of studying a cross-disciplinary subject

There is an increasing number of multi-disciplinary courses (such as Bioinformatics and Personalised Medicine) which involve cross-disciplinary subjects (such as Computer Programming) now available in the higher education sector. While they are technically informed by current job requirements, most course teams are faced with the challenge of teaching vastly diverse subjects. Considering that these multi-disciplinary courses are new, most of the time they lack appropriately tailored teaching methods, leading to a significant portion of this challenge (of learning those diverse subjects) being delegated directly to the students, causing stress and anxiety among them. This is contrary to traditional courses where one would study a single subject throughout the period of higher education and specialize in it in the end. This, in contrast, represents a comparatively relaxed learning track, and one where well tried-and-tested teaching methods exist. The aim of the project was to identify the extent to which the proposed teaching approaches contributed to improving the self-confidence and wellbeing of students of a cross-disciplinary subject (Computer Science) in a multi-disciplinary course (BSc Hons in Stratified aka Personalised Medicine), with a view to sharing these with the wider academic community.