Expanding on George's point, Tim Killeen, professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences, gave an example of a topic that was mistakenly presented four different times by four different professors.

Tim: The problem with interdisciplinary team teaching is all the disconnects. For example, we taught the peppered moth four times in one semester. The peppered moth is an example of rapid evolution in an organism in response to external change, which in this case was a rise in pollution in England during the Industrial Revolution. It was taught four times by different professors. There wasn't enough coordination.

George Kling and Ben van der Pluijm, geology professor, stated that to appropriately coordinate the lectures, the instructors themselves need to become students of each others' discipline.

George: To properly organize the classes, you have to process something you don't really know that much about. You become a student who has to learn material from your colleagues' fields. You are a freshman. All of a sudden I have to figure out how Ben puts his stuff together. Just like the students are figuring out how everyone puts their stuff together. We're all students of the others' discipline. That is why we all teach this instead of one person.

Ben: Exactly, that's why this matter of preparation time comes in again, because all of a sudden I have to speak about prokaryotes and eukaryotes. I just mentioned something in class because it was not really important from the rock perspective. I see now how it could be made a lot more important after having talked with my colleagues, which forces you to change, even though what you have said is still perfectly valid in your own field.

The GSIs have a similar time burden when it comes to connecting information from one field to another. Although they do not have to coordinate lectures like the professors, they are responsible for helping students synthesize the diverse content of the course. This means answering questions about subjects that are unrelated to their own studies.

Ben van der Pluijm, geology professor: In order to answer students' questions in lab, the GSIs need to know what so-and-so said and what was meant. Well, that requires the GSIs to do a lot more than they would normally do as GSIs. So that structure can't stay. You can't expect every GSI to know economic models as well as social models, psychological, geological, and biological. So in the short run, it's a difficult experience for them, because sometimes they work 30 hours in a week. This is just another reason why there aren't very many courses like this, that have a true interdisciplinarity to them. And there won't be in the current structure. Ten years from now, I could see us sitting around the table and having exactly the same conversation, asking the same questions.

George Kling: The GSIs probably work more than they are supposed to. There are pretty strict contracts now, 17 to 20 hours a week, that a full-time position is supposed to work and they are working 25 to 30. We drop a lot of responsibility on them and it is pretty clear that if they don't live up to it, we are in big trouble.

Dave Halsing and Patrick Livingood, GSIs, presented their own views on the time burden of repairing the interdisciplinary disconnects, explaining that their willingness to do so is linked to their dedication and love of teaching. They contend that, without these characteristics, GSIs might not be as keen on taking extra responsibility.

Dave: In a large class with lots of professors like this, the professors aren't there every day in lecture. And so we're kind of the source of continuity for the students throughout the semester...And I think that they're very lucky. I mean, that's going to sound like I'm patting ourselves on the back, but I think they got lucky that they got a batch of GSIs last semester and this time who enjoy teaching and are dedicated. I got a lot of feedback from students saying that the discussions where we synthesized the lecture topics were very helpful.

I know a lot of graduate students are GSIs because of the tuition credit and the salary. They don't particularly love it, and it's a "have to" rather than a "get to" for them. And if one of those people wound up in a course like this, I think the course would suffer a lot. Where they do better is in courses where the instructor takes a larger role, and the GSI is really for support and grading and things like that.

Patrick: The students come in and get the lecture from the professors but we run all of the other actual student activities or interactions.

Dave: Half-way through, as Patrick says, we sort of figured out, "Hey, if this semester is going to work, it's going to work because we're going to take care of these things." And so we did. But I think there needs to be one person, one faculty member, who takes responsibility for the course from beginning to end and works with the GSIs to keep everything running smoothly...Because there's so many different faculty drifting in and out, there isn't one person running the content or the flow of the course. There's no one person that the students can go to.