There is growing interest in applying both agile and lean concepts in the classroom to improve educational experiences. In this chapter, we draw together the disparate ideas of these two fields from...

Life-long learning and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the current fast-evolving and ever-changing society requires modern pedagogical tools and methodologies that help the transmission of key competencies such as coping with uncertainty, adaptability, creativity, dialog, respect, self-confidence, emotional intelligence, responsibility and systemic thinking. The recent trend of the application of Agile methodologies for the management of projects in different fields can be a valuable tool to convey these competencies due to the participative, collaborative and constructionist principles in which they are deeply rooted. Some experiences of the application of Agile Methodologies in education—originating what is known as Agile Education—are, therefore, starting to appear in the literature. This work carries out a systematic review to analyze how this modern pedagogical tool is being used to foster key sustainable development competencies in the field of education. Results are presented for 11 out of 121 analyzed studies which present a direct link between key ESD competencies and Agile Education. It is shown that Agile Education creates a learning environment favorable for the creation of responsible and sustainable citizens while improving the performance, satisfaction and motivation of both faculty and students.

This book explores the application of agile and lean techniques, originally from the field of software development and manufacturing, to various aspects of education. It covers a broad range of topics

Besides professional programmers, many “end-user programmers” write code in their daily life. Given that so much of end-user-created software suffers from quality problems, Software Engineering (SE)...

International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education

Agile software development methods are widespread in industry, and there is a wealth of academic research and practitioner publications currently available from this perspective. With the rise of Agile within companies worldwide, it is increasingly important for information systems education to keep up with this trend to ensure curriculum and courses are up-to-date. Students in the computing disciplines must be prepared to enter a job market where Agile is commonplace. As such, the topic of Agile in teaching and learning is critically important. The current special issue includes a rich collection of articles providing information systems educators with research-based, practical approaches for both teaching Agile (“the what”) and using Agile as a pedagogical approach (“the how”). In an effort to assist information systems educators categorize the growing amount of literature related to Agile in teaching and learning, a conceptual framework is provided which places the literature along the two axes of pedagogy (“the how”) and the content (“the what”) ranging from other, non-Agile to Agile. Finally, the authors present a call for future research integrating Agile on a meta-level in the course development process. We hope that this special issue inspires educators and researchers to consider integrating Agile into their teaching and learning.

Uncertain and ambiguous environments are commonplace in information systems development (ISD) projects, and while different Agile frameworks welcome changes in organizational, technical, and business environments, the incurred uncertainty is known to negatively affect the development process and the quality of the final product. The effects of uncertainty on ISD projects have been studied in the past in real organizational contexts, but the effects of uncertainty on students in Agile systems development have received less attention from scholars. In this study, we measured the effects of experienced uncertainty on students’ performance in an Agile systems development course and how uncertainty affected the quality of the system developed by the students using Scrum. We implemented the course using a problem based learning (PBL) approach and simulated uncertainty through various work environment reflecting concepts. Our study reveals that the effects of uncertainty are fairly similar among students and software professionals, and we identified three different coping strategies that students used with varying degrees of success. We present that learning approaches such as PBL enable a befitting environment for students to acquire hands-on experience in coping with uncertain environments, thus mitigating the problems students are likely to face in their work environments.

Academics teaching software development courses are experimenting with teaching methods aiming to improve students’ learning experience and learning outcomes. Since Agile software development is gaining popularity in industry due to positive effects on managing projects, academics implement similar Agile approaches in student-centered learning environments. In this paper, we discuss teaching introductory programming based on Scrum. Our learning environment, supported by the Doubtfire learning management system, fosters perceived autonomy and perceived competence by providing tools and opportunities for self-regulated learners to adjust their learning strategies. Evaluation of the learning environment revealed that students want to be in control of their learning.