Abstract:

One of the main contemporary challenges of education is keeping up with a frequently shifting and unpredictable labor market, pressured to deliver highly skilled, global-oriented community leaders. Higher education is especially challenged considering the fact that universities are most often traditional, institutionalized systems with limited flexibility and national constraints. The very essence of the way study programs are designed and implemented must be changed if universities are to remain the most prominent credential bodies. In addressing these issues, we suggest an agile approach – applying a variation of work methodologies and strategies created in the world of software development and lean/just-in-time production industries focused on maintaining and promoting high rates of improvement.
The suggested framework builds its success on a set of values and principles such as welcoming changing requirements, quick and regular adaptation to changing circumstances, frequent/iterative delivery, self-organizing, cross-functional teams and motivated individuals. This student-oriented approach, based on the productive principles of learner autonomy, empiricism, collaboration, prioritization, time boxing, transparency and trust for every step within a given framework, empowers students to get involved in creating their own education process, to design their professional future, to set goals that matter to them personally and to fully invest themselves in team creativity and innovation. Through lean/agile methods and tools students learn to enjoy the process, to produce the change and to adapt to change more easily – both when their professional field develops, and when faced with a change of environment, i.e. in a global context. The suggested methodology is embedded in the curriculum as a type of hidden curriculum, and the very process, rather than the content, is innovative and adaptable. These tools can help create a new world of higher education which can respond to future challenges.
We present a model through a case study of designing a curriculum for language study programs which builds on extensive research of labor market needs, and enables almost real-time inclusion of shifts that occur in the real world in the curriculum. By identifying all relevant stakeholders and decision makers, and including them in the process of higher education, universities can regain and fortify their role and purpose in the 21st century digital, mass society. We use the example of languages, as an essential tool for efficient communication in today's and tomorrow's globalized, connected world.
Through a detailed theoretical account, modular paradigm, and case study, we explore the possible applications of agile methodologies in higher education in the context of and for the betterment of an ever-developing and ever-connecting world of global citizens.

Keywords:

Agile, lean, Higher Education, curriculum design, global.