The Dimensions-approach and the envisioned ongoing thematic learning processes require and realise a transdisciplinary understanding of phenomena.
OPEDUCA-based Learning is per definition all-encompassing from the perspective of school-subjects and disciplines, not because ESD makes them so but because they are from nature.
An interdisciplinary approach is required to address an issue comprised of (parts of) two or more disciplines, the joining issue. Multidisciplinary concerning the disciplines an issue comprises, two or more ‘engulfed’ by the issue.
Transdisciplinary regards issues that don’t belong to the realm of one or an assembled group of disciplines and can only be addressed as a joint effort.
In OPEDUCA all subjects and issues students learn on are connected, intertwined, part of a logical whole in which pathways of learning are discovered and researched by the students. Compare the neural structure of our brain. Typically students, great to be observed in puberty age, 'run from left to right, back and forth, up and down' in their thinking and acting - they 'jump around', often not focused on one thing, at least giving the impression to be occupied by everything at once and not concentrated. They are (like younger students also) however masters in associating - a quality, as teachers building OPEDUCA note with some regret, the average educator has lost along the way. For Inquiry Based Learning however the quality to link, re-link, associate, combine, connect is essential. And far away from subject driven instruction practice.
Teachers can rest assure that in OPEDUCA they can, as the students do themselves, keep precise track of study-results, also through the traditional lens of curricula and examination demands. It will take some time getting used to, but they as well as parents will meet a personalized-learning environment (in real life as well as web-based) which invites to observe, follow, support and advise each student. Allowing students their development, in various tempo and varied emphasis. They will show you proudly where they are and going to, because it is theirs and theirs alone to do so.
Under pressure to modernise, innovate, fulfill stakeholders' expectations, follow policies or political whims, schools are found to decorate themselves as if they are Christmas-trees, generate stand-alone projects and series of activities parallel to the real of the education they offer to comply with standards, curricula and examinations demands. Suffering under layers of bureaucratic fog and commercial interventions, they are found to be deluded by preachers of progress that incur floods of change, breaking on their shores where own initiatives are too often washed away and erode own transition capacity. Following ESD-based Education, the OPEDUCA-concept sees to an integration of loosely organised 'assembled' educations, merging them as the natural whole their are.