Are you looking for a way to let learner outcomes drive your course? Do you want to provide opportunities for students to reflect on their work and course progress? In this interactive discovery session, learn how Scrum, an Agile framework commonly used in software development, was applied to course redesign.
Do you want to turn your course into an epic? Are you looking for a way to let learner outcomes, not content, drive your course? Are you looking to build in opportunities for students to reflect on their work and course progress? Do you want to provide more flexibility in the course? Learn how to design a course using Scrum, a framework used to implement Agile project management methods, to accomplish these goals. Agile, and therefore Scrum, is an iterative and flexible approach to project management that is commonly used in software development. Using Scrum in course design allows students to reflect and make changes and allows instructors to review the course and adjust based on student needs.
In Scrum, an epic is a statement describing the intended goal of a project. The course epic is a sentence that summarizes the purpose of a course. A story in the Scrum framework is a goal that must be met to work toward the epic and typically requires a series of tasks to be completed. This is like a course outcome, where students must complete certain types of assignments or meet certain benchmarks in order to show mastery of that outcome. Each story requires assessment criteria to determine whether the story is complete. The assessment criteria for a course story could be a rubric, assignment criteria, or an exam score threshold. This is an opportunity to introduce more student choice into the course, such as offering multiple types of assignments.
Level of Participation:
In this interactive discovery session, the presenter will engage attendees in a small group discussion. For about five minutes, the presenter will give a brief overview of the Scrum framework and describe how it was applied to the redesign of a blended undergraduate engineering course. During the remaining time, the presenter will facilitate a question and answer session and discuss with attendees how they might use Scrum in the design of their courses. You will receive a handout with examples from the presenter’s course and other resources. The slides and handout will be available on the conference website.
Session Goals:
In this session, you will be introduced to Scrum as a project management technique, see an example of how Scrum was used to redesign a blended course, and receive a handout with examples and resources to use this strategy in your course. In this informal presentation, you will have the opportunity to discuss with the presenter how you can use aspects of Scrum in your course.
References:
Howard, Anna K. T. “Teaching Statics Using Agile Methodologies.” Paper presented at the 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Salt Lake City, UT, June 2018.
Pope-Ruark, Rebecca. Agile Faculty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017.