Abstract:

The interest in agile concepts for teaching and learning as well as in introducing methods from industry into education in general and the Scrum approach in particular has increased in the last decades.The purpose of the structured literature review is to explore the hitherto existing Scrum activities in higher education environment. In this context, the author would like to find out whether the hypothesis can be formulated that the learning experience of mastering Scrum improves the agile learning process of the students if individual Scrum Learning Process Coaching (LPC) can be used to harmonize the personal learning strategies and to foster the self-regulated learning. Although the findings promote the essential Scrum skills and practices, the analyses of the Scrum implementation variants used as a well-planned instructional designs and didactical approaches lack insights for a sustainable effect on the students´ individual process of learning. Subsequently, several research gaps are identified that requires a research concept of Design-based Research.

The Systematic Literature Review (SLR) gives an overview to the readers who are interested in starting or improving Scrum Education not only in the field of higher engineering education. The author provides insights into how Scrum teaching can arise, because it seems to be currently an experimental approach and the conclusions were not so satisfying. Therefore, the sources of the structured literature research allow us to identify the most important categories for didactical approaches for the use of Scrum. The result of the SLR should be to gain insights into the technical and didactical approach of Scrum and its required elements of values, principles, events, artifacts and roles, techniques and tools, especially for retrospectives, which have currently been described by scholars and practitioners. It serves as part of the research agenda to provide further analysis steps as input for Scrum as a learning process coaching in the STEM education context by answering the following questions: Which Scrum Framework components are used in the teaching and learning setting? Do the described application scenarios strengthen certain soft skills of students? How could we organize, introduce and connect the agile methodology Scrum with respect to their application in the higher education environment?

All these new research results can be related to a subsequent Scrum LPC domain concept by formulating the following research questions: What are the prime categories of the Scrum settings in education context, according to published literature? What Scrum challenges have been reported in Scrum-oriented didactical approaches, in general? What are the existing success factors to cope with Learning Process Coaching in general, as per educational Scrum literature? Only the first question can be published here due to the limitation of characters and pages.

The searching procedure is conducted in nine databases. The search strings and their descriptions are “Scrum” - the dedicated and mostly mentioned word is the expression for the methodology for “Agile” and “Education” as inclusion of schools, universities and other educational institutions as well as various training and consulting services and “Coaching” which is the all-encompassing term for service-based guidance. The publication year was from 01/2015 to 03/2020. From 598 selected papers, 12 papers deliver a valuable approach.

Keywords:

Agile Method Scrum, Learning Process Coaching, Higher Education, Systematic Literature Review.