Abstract:

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of detailed practices for IT service management. ITIL consists of five different life cycle phases that deal with different aspects of IT service management. Each life cycle phase consist of a set of processes that intend to help IT Service Providers deliver services in an effective and efficient manner. ITIL is published as a series of five core volumes that constitutes 1329 pages plus appendix. When it comes to teaching ITIL it has been a challenge that there are 26 processes which inexperienced students struggle to distinguish from each other. The content of these processes can be perceived as monotonous and boring, and it can be difficult for students to acquire knowledge of what actually characterizes the different processes and how they relate to each other. Based on these challenges we wanted to move from traditional lectures to an educational approach that activates the students more. In this paper, we describe a new teaching plan for a basic 5 ECTS course in ITIL. The teaching plan is inspired by research within student active, problem-based and collaborative learning. We describe how the teaching was planned and implemented and what kind of experiences we did. This serves as a basis for discussing the effects we have achieved and the improvements we aim for in the next implementation. The paper starts with an introduction where we present the motivation for introducing student active, problem-based and collaborative learning in a basic course in ITIL. An implementation of ITIL processes in an organization focuses on moving resources from reactive to proactive work and this inspired us in relation to the pedagogical approach for this ITIL course. We use traditional lectures to prepare the students for workshops where they collaborate to solve practical ITIL implementation challenges. After the introduction, we have a brief explanation of the ITIL framework. This part outlines the five life cycle phases of ITIL and an overview of associated processes. Next, we present the new student-active pedagogical approach. We have been through a transition from 100% lecture-based and individual exercises, to 50% group-based workshops with a specific focus on student active, problem-based and collaborative learning. In conjunction with the workshops, we have developed and used a practical case throughout the course. We explain the major content of this practical case and how it is used to address implementation challenges that varies between ITIL lifecycle phases. Then, we briefly explain the methodological approach used in the study before discussing the experiences it has provided. The course with the new teaching plan is completed for two different bachelor's degrees in IT, with two groups consisting of 50 and 40 students. For the second group we used an updated version of the course plan. Student feedback shows that the workshops are both instructive and motivating. We discuss this feedback and compare our findings with other studies, which confirms that students remember better over time when they collaborate to solve practical problems. Therefore, we argue that our new pedagogical approach will better prepare students for practical use of ITIL when they start their professional career. Finally, this paper contains some concluding remarks and outlook for further studies in which the purpose is to improve this teaching plan.

Keywords:

Student Active Learning, Problem-Based Learning, Collaborate Learning, ITIL.