Agile and Student-Centred Teaching of Agile/Scrum Concepts

TL;DR

This paper shares experiences and insights from teaching Agile/Scrum in a student-centred, flexible course, emphasizing authentic assessments and scalable online evaluation methods for large student cohorts.

Contribution

It introduces a student-centred, flexible teaching approach for Agile/Scrum, with strategies for authentic assessment and scalable online evaluation in large classes.

Findings

Effective course structures support blended learning.

Authentic assessments enhance student engagement.

Scalable online assessments are feasible for large cohorts.

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss our experience in designing and teaching a course on Software Engineering Project Management, where the focus is on Agile/Scrum development and Requirement Engineering activities. The course has undergone fundamental changes since 2020 to make the teaching approach more student-centred and flexible. As many universities abandoned having face-to-face exams at the end of the semester, authentic assessments now play an even more important role than before. This makes assessment of students' work even more challenging, especially if we are dealing with large cohorts of students. The complexity is not only in dealing with diversity in the student cohorts when elaborating the assessment tasks, but also in being able to provide feedback and marks in a timely and fairly. We report our lessons learned, which might provide useful insights for teaching Agile/Scrum concepts to undergraduate and postgraduate students. We also analyse what course structure might be effective to support a blended learning approach, as well as what could be a reasonable structure of online assessments, to keep them both authentic and scalable for large cohorts of students.