This paper presents the review of literatures that shows the contribution of the agile methodology towards teaching and learning environment at university level. Teaching and learning at university has since migrated from traditional learning to active learning methodology where students are expected to learn by doing rather than listening passively to lectures alone. The agile methodology naturally has promoted the active participation of team members during system development phases. Some literature have proposed ways of adopting agile into active learning to improve teaching and learning processes and have highlighted this method as a great success. We would like to highlight how efficient the agile concept is in tackling several situations in academic learning as shown by an interesting mapping of agile principles to the classroom environment. We also offer options for the agile evaluation framework to consider academic environment as a tool to obtain the agile performance feedback.
Top1. Introduction
Traditional teaching and learning have most often than not neglected the concept of active teaching and learning in academic environment. For decades, the academic community has been conducting researches and experiments in order to increase students’ participation during their learning in the classroom (Cubric, 2013). Recent studies show the usage of technology, team discussion and sharing knowledge session have become favorite options to promote this active learning concept. Where the lecturer is the immediate source of the knowledge in the traditional learning, the active learning concept encourages lecturer to become the facilitator between the students and the knowledge itself. Active learning requires students to be independent in getting the basic knowledge by searching the resources online or offline and doing discussion with classmates (Dillard., 2012; Hagan, 2012; Michael., 2007; Solomon., 2013). Lecturers provide clarification on what the students have learnt and emphasize more on providing higher level of thinking and challenges. The relationship of lecturer, knowledge and student is reflected in Figure 1.
The agile methodology has been introduced in the academic environment as a topic or subject for computer science students to learn about developing good software in a timely manner to satisfy client’s requirement. The agile methodology underlines direct and frequent communication between client and developer through its incremental processes. The proposed solutions are evolved through communication and collaboration of organizations and teams. Therefore, the key success of agile methodology relies on communication among team members and the ability to adapt to rapid changes (A.H.W. Chun, 2004; D. Monett, 2013; J. C. Stewart, C. S. DeCusatis, K. Kidder, & and K.M. Anne, 2009) .
As teaching agile is part of the curriculum in many computing classes, some educational practitioners have started research on the efficient techniques to teach any subjects to students using agile methodology. By embracing a variety of tools and techniques, teaching using agile method has become an interesting topic of discussion among lecturers and instructors. Some lecturers and instructors have begun conducting experiments in teaching by adopting the agile concept itself.
Top2. Research Questions
The present research aims to collect previous works that have examined the use of agile methodology to improve the teaching and learning delivery. The following research questions (RQ) are raised therefore:
RQ1. What are the main goals of the previous researches?
RQ2. What are suggested approaches and methods used?
RQ3. How the previous research is being conducted?
RQ4. What are case studies or datasets are used?
RQ5. Would it be possible to carry forward the previous research into a new method in teaching and learning?