PRISMA
The PRISMA initiative has developed a platform for engagement, teaching and learning. It is meant to support the capstone course that enables students to learn and apply their knowledge in a multidisciplinary framework. The platform builds on four pillars (Sprinkles, Community, Coaching and Course), that operate at different stages of the studies and complement each other. Most questions in this document will be answered for each pillar separately, yet one has to see PRISMA as a coherent whole. The Sprinkles generate visibility and reflection in the Basisjahr, the Community keeps the reflection going, the Coaching program trains master students to support the scalability of the bachelor level Course, and the Course integrates and enables multidisciplinary collaboration as well as critical and systems thinking.
Implementation of the course during the time of distance learning
PRISMA (previously called ROSE) is a 2018 ETH+ student initiative, which was initially developed and implemented by
students. Funded by Innovedum, it is now one of the biggest teaching innovation initiatives of ETH. Originally, the ROSE
project intended to develop a course. However, it became clear that scalability cannot be achieved within a single
course. Hence, the project was redesigned to leverage the journey that all students undertake once they join ETH, to
achieve maximum visibility and impact with minimal disruption of the existing curricula. The current PRISMA platform
builds on four pillars (Sprinkles, Community, Coaching and Course), that operate at different stages of the studies and
complement each other.
PRISMA intends to overcome the silos problem of individual courses that focus, understandably, on a specific topic
within a specific program. We provide an environment for students to develop multidisciplinary teamwork skills on top
of their otherwise technical education at ETHZ. These competencies are selected from the ETH Competence
Framework, which is part of the ETH Talent project (e.g. Sensitivity to diversity, Adaptability and flexibility, Decisionmaking
skills, and Cooperation and teamwork). Multidisciplinary work can be done best at ETHZ by tackling students
from different departments. Currently, PRISMA is present at 15/16 departments, with different intensities (see graphic
below).
