An adaptive 3D virtual learning environment for training software developers in scrum

TL;DR

This paper presents an adaptive virtual learning environment for teaching Scrum to software developers, leveraging Felder's learning style theory to personalize training and improve learning outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adaptive virtual environment for Scrum training based on learning styles, demonstrating its potential to enhance learning gains in software engineering education.

Findings

Students with matched instruction showed higher learning gains.

Matched instruction led to less variability in learning outcomes.

Preliminary results support the effectiveness of adaptive environments in software engineering.

Abstract

Scrum is one of the most used frameworks for agile software development because of its potential improvements in productivity, quality, and client satisfaction. Academia has also focussed on teaching Scrum practices to prepare students to face common software engineering challenges and facilitate their insertion in professional contexts. Furthermore, advances in learning technologies currently offer many virtual learning environments to enhance learning in many ways. Their capability to consider the individual learner preferences has led a shift to more personalised training approaches, requiring that the environments adapt themselves to the learner. We propose an adaptive approach for training developers in Scrum, including an adaptive virtual learning environment based on Felder's learning style theory. Although still preliminary, our findings show that students who used the environment and received instruction matching their preferences obtained sightly higher learning gains than students who received a different instruction than the one they preferred. We also noticed less variability in the learning gains of students who received instruction matching their preferences. The relevance of this work goes beyond the impact on learning gains since it describes how adaptive virtual learning environments can be used in the domain of Software Engineering.