Agile Manifesto in Higher Education

2012 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Technology for Education Agile Manifesto in Higher Education Venkatesh Kamat Dept. of Computer Science & Technology Goa University Taleigaon Plateau, Goa, India [email protected] education. In a higher education system, at the input end student is our client but at the output end industry should be our focus. Academic products are expected to add value to the student. However, we do not see much collaboration happening between students and the institutes or between institutes and the industry. Each one blames the other but the blame game does not fix the bug. We see frustration at either end. Quick fix solutions such as coaching classes and finishing schools are the manifestations of these frustrations. Keeping in view the current practices in higher education, we have defined few guiding principles for using agile practices in education, on the lines of Agile Manifesto [2] in software development. These guiding principles come handy whenever there is conflict of interest among stakeholders in practicing agile in education. Agile manifesto in Education • Teachers and Students over Administration and Infrastructure • Competence and Collaboration over Compliance and Competition • Employability and Marketability over Syllabus and Marks • Attitude and Learning skills over Aptitude and Degree We all agree that that there is value in items on the right but in agile education we would like to see more value on items on the left. We see ample opportunities to practice these principles in higher education and bring in more quality and productivity to higher education. A limited case study on agile practices in higher education is reported in the paper [3]. Abstract— Present mass education system that can best be described using the factory metaphor is witnessing criminal wastage of resources. Despite of regulatory framework and accreditation mechanism, the quality in mass higher education system in India still remains elusive. We observe that Lean and Agile practices that have met with great success in manufacturing and software industry can offer few of their practices to higher education in order to reduce the wastage. In this paper we have reflected on some of the current practices in higher education and proposed an Agile Manifesto for education on the lines of Agile Manifesto in the software development. The paper puts forward a novel idea of how we can improve the quality and productivity in education sector by practicing the agile manifesto with the help of ICT. Keywords - Lean; Agile; Higher Education I. INTRODUCTION In the last five years India has witnessed unprecedented expansion in higher education. The prime motivator behind the expansion plan is the country’s concern on the much-debated demographic dividend. In order to meet this challenge, higher education requires serious reforms. Regulatory bodies such as University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) have been ineffective and their very role and existence is being questioned [1]. A report by the software industry group NASSCOM, that represents and sets the tone for public policy for the Indian software industry has declared that 75 percent of Indian engineering graduates are unemployable. The recent ambitious plan of the Ministry of Human Resources and Development (MHRD) Govt. of India “National Mission on Education through ICT” (NMEICT) is primarily designed to bridge the academic divide between country’s elite institutions and the rest of the institutions. In this paper, we take the view that the technology is necessary but may not be sufficient to address the problem of this magnitude. Simultaneously, we need to bring in the change in three core process areas namely, • Teaching/Learning process • Evaluation process • Administrative process. Currently there is so much of duplication, redundant and unnecessary work happening in each of these areas that we think lean and agile practices could reduce this wastage. In software development, we understand the importance of collaboration between development team and the client. This focus on the client is often missing in 978-0-7695-4759-6/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/T4E.2012.49 II. CURRENT SCENARIO IN HIGHER EDUCATION In a fast changing world, product cycles are shrinking. The market uncertainty is now rubbing on academic products and services. We may need to prepare students of tomorrow for the jobs that may not exist today. However at present it takes minimum 3-5 years for the university to update its syllabus. Students find stereo type classroom teaching boring. Many teachers fear that students may not attend classes without mandatory 75% attendance rule. The survey shows that University students have average attention span of just about 10 minutes [4]. No wonder only 10% learning happens in the classroom. Most of our academic programs are rigid and follow waterfall delivery model. They are like fixed cost, fixed time and fixed scope project which throws away the most important forth parameter the quality. There is high command and control practiced by academic 231 Bloom’s taxonomy. On the other hand subjective test helps in integrating the new concept with something already known. Subjective test should not be asking the obvious but need to test the application of the concept close to real life situation. Currently teachers waste lot of time in carrying out mundane administrative activities which could be either automated or facilitated using ICT. IT Industry is routinely using many such tools to improve their productivity. Academia can definitely take cue from them. administrators under the guise of discipline. The teacher accountability is important but it can not be simply measured through clock hours. There is no trust between administration and academia and this reflects in the conduct of our examinations where 50% of the questions are set by an external examiners. For administration, procedures are more important than the outcome. The decision making process is often defensive. There is more concern whether the decision is being taken correctly rather than correct decision is being taken. This often puts a severe constraint on decision making process causing inordinate delays. III. IV. CONCLUSION Today ICT provides enough opportunities in the field of education to be more creative and make teaching/learning experience more enjoyable. In rapidly changing world, agile learning is the need of the hour. With the advent of Web 2.0 it is possible for an agile learner to learn any subject on one’s own. The industry is also seeking candidates with agile mindset. However, the traditional higher education set up is yet to benefit from the agile practices. An early exposure to agile learning environment can help the students to make a smooth transition to workplace environments. In this paper we have reflected on the current practices in higher education and argued in favor of practicing agile manifesto in higher education. In future we would like to see more educationists take the risk and experiment with agile principles in the area of teaching/learning, evaluation and administration. PRACTICING LEAN AND AGILE Lean and agile practices have its roots anchored in manufacturing [5]. The most important principle in agile is to take continuous feedback, learn from the previous iterations and try and improve in the next iteration. There is no concept of best practices. Better and better practices will keep on evolving as practitioners master their environment. Agile means taking risk. In the process one may make mistakes but the important thing is to detect the mistakes early and fix them as soon as possible. Agile manifesto in education can be applied in all the three core process areas in academics with support of ICT. Small collaborative teams could be formed for coteaching a subject. For instance a course on Geometric Modeling could be co-taught by Computer Science, Mathematics and a faculty from Mechanical Engineering. Few sessions could be handled by industry specialist to bring in a practical perspective. All collaborations to be facilitated using Learning Management System (LMS). All teaching material could be culled out from available free resources on the Internet rather than each faculty preparing one’s own content from scratch. Teachers could then spend more time solving difficulties of the students then lecturing. If the classroom size is big, teachers could use clickers and ask objective questions every 10-15 minutes to check how students are doing. In case the concept is not understood, one can either repeat the content or at this point break the class into smaller groups and take the help of students who have understood the concept to explain it to others. There is ample scope to use Web 2.0 tools to encourage students to collaborate and learn from each other. Evaluation could be done continuously in small increments to avoid few big-bang evaluations scheduled at periodic intervals. Our observation is that the big-bang approach to examination creates lot of stress and does not lead to deep learning. Evaluations done at more frequent intervals with small weightages is likely to be less stressful and more effective. A simple practice like a stand up quiz at the beginning of a session based on what was taught in the previous session could be quite useful. This is where technology could play a significant role. The test could be scheduled just in time through mobiles, or using clickers or through LMS. Automated Multiple Choice Question is the best method for this kind of testing. It is important to test objectively and subjectively. Each type of testing serves a different purpose. Objective tests are more like unit test that can check level of understanding of a concept, particularly, if the tests are designed using REFERENCES [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] 232 "Yashpal-committee-report" at http://www.academicsindia.com/Yashpal-committee-report.pdf, 2009. “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” at http://agilemanifesto.org/, 2001. Kamat V. and Sardessai S, "Agile Practices in Higher Education: A Case Study”, IEEE Proceedings Agile India 2012 conference in Bangalore 17-19 Feb 2012 pp. 48-55. "Students only have 10-minute attention span” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8449307.stm" 12, January 2010 M. Poppendieck and T. Poppendieck “Lean Software Development An Agile Toolkit”, Addison Wesley, 2003.