Abstract:

The higher education (HE) world today is faced with the challenge of fulfilling its purpose to develop our social, cultural and economic future, given that it lacks ethos and organisational strategies capable of efficiently and effectively responding to a global community in which the underlying constant is change. Responding to change becomes one of the main responsibilities of HE. If academia is expected to deliver a highly skilled, creative, adaptable workforce, i.e. ethical world citizens ready to successfully move around fast paced changing job markets, a major shift in the HE paradigm is needed. Responding to change and development are two main drives of agile competitive environments, and at the same time the main purposes of HE. HE institutions need to question and assess their paradigms and structures against client-driven values, to step out of isolation, and to agilify themselves. Academic courses with a few exceptions are notoriously ‘time locked’ and soon become out of touch with authentic industry practices. Changes in the labour market require a quicker response from the education sector. Current revision methods within the domain of higher education are particularly time consuming and cumbersome and therefore inappropriate.

Focusing on a particular international project as a case study (Creative International Entrepreneurial Learning) aimed at embedding the scrum/agile methodology into the curriculum (which is thus designed as a dynamic process rather than fixed plan) as an example of trying to institutionalise Scrum as an agile pedagogy in the context of higher education we will show where the possible challenges lie and how such a development can easily be misinterpreted by the resident funders and experts in higher education innovation. The participants will be challenged to think about how new skills could be integrated in existing academic courses by using scrum roles, procedures and artifacts . Especially, they will be challenged to think about knowledge objects as scrum deliverables, learning outcomes as product backlogs. They will also be invited to rethink the traditional roles of professors, teachers and students in terms of scrum roles, and to think about who actually are customers in higher education, who are the pigs, the chickens, and the wolves. What are the values, and what the “working software” would be. The case study also outlines a scrum model for setting up student start up companies and how to develop a scrum model of student innovative entrepreneurship in order to link academic processes to the actual world of real work. Participants will discover how the embedding of agile practices within course content and training in agile methodology for enterprises, students and lecturers can lead to increased businesses flexibility and responsiveness and enhanced student employability. ( Course records). Participants will enact this process by designing and creating a knowledge learning object through scrum processes. We will also jointly analyse barriers to success in knowledge transfer situations involving scrum with participants contributing their own knowledge in this area.

Keywords:

Agile, scrum, Higher Education, modular, change, global.