Micro-sprints: An agile approach to curriculum development in partnership with students
Written by John Owen and Cath Wasiuk
Background
In October 2019, John Owen (Lecturer in Technology Enhanced Learning in i3HS) and Cath Wasiuk (Learning Technologist in i3HS) were approached by Roger Harrison (Senior Lecturer in Public Health) to develop a short open-access course on anti-microbial resistance (AMR) in partnership with undergraduate students adopting a hackathon approach to development. Roger had identified that an introductory online course on antibiotics and drug resistance infections did not exist and that there was an opportunity to develop a course that aligned with the university’s social responsibility priorities of embracing learning without boundaries.
Building the team
The students were recruited to the project via the Volunteering Hub. Their contribution was voluntary but all hours logged on the project could contribute towards the university’s Stellify Award, an extra-curricular accolade for undergraduate students. The team included 8 undergraduate students from disciplines including Pharmacy, Microbiology, Chemistry and Physics. Roger had already recruited a graduate intern (Caitlin Greenland-Bews) with excellent knowledge of AMR to join the project. John and Cath joined the team to provide input on curriculum design, content development and the different online tools and platforms available.
Students as Partners (SaP)
This was an exciting opportunity to work with students as partners on a curriculum design project, something neither of us had been involved with before. The first thing we did was to read the literature on students as partners to give us a background to the approach and learn from the experience of others. We found that partnership is an emergent practice and one that is often unfamiliar to students, staff and academic developers, however, the literature strongly suggests that true partnerships are generally positive for both staff and students and often performed in ways that exceeded both staff and student expectations.
Applying Agile to student partnership projects
The more we read, the more it became apparent that the guiding principles of student partnership projects — Respect, Reciprocity and Responsibility were closely aligned to the values and principles of the (Agile) Scrum Framework, in particular — courage, focus, commitment, openness, and respect for and trust in the team. The i3HS hub team work in an agile way where possible to develop teaching materials, which can sometimes be challenging in Higher Education.
Based on this observation, we aligned and adapted the Scrum Framework with the 5D learning design model (a model widely used at the university for curriculum design) to create a new methodology for working with students as partners on curriculum design projects. The new methodology uses Micro-sprints to facilitate a productive and transparent team working environment where dialogue and feedback play a central role. Traditional sprints within the Scrum Framework can last somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks. However, as students were only able to work on the project for an afternoon, we condensed the sprints into 3 hours each, ensuring the 4 sprint events of Planning, Build, Review and Retrospective remained as core processes.
An example of a 3-hour micro-sprint looks something like this:
Evaluation
The inclusion of reflective activities at the end of each micro-sprint (Retrospective) has helped to inform part of the evaluation of this new approach of working with students as partners. After each micro-sprint, we asked students to reflect on the process, that is, what went well and what didn’t go so well so that we could create actions for the next sprint to improve the process and increase productivity, and ultimately feed into improving the micro-sprint process more widely. One student commented:
‘The team worked really well today, especially in dividing up tasks and working in pairs. It was nice to keep coming back to the group to ask for feedback and ideas. This made the session productive and enjoyable.’
Another commented:
‘The team is getting way better in efficiency and time management.’
This is an exciting project and one where we hope that the student voice can positively impact, and continually improve, our teaching and learning practice and processes in the i3HS Hub and across the University.
Going forwards
We aim to launch the AMR course in March 2020 and are using this method to create more open access courses. We believe the micro-sprint approach to working in partnership with students can be easily adapted for different projects and contexts and could be more widely adopted across the University.
About the Authors
Cath Wasiuk is a Learning Technologist at The University of Manchester in the i3HS Hub. She has over 10 years of e-learning experience within various roles across the Higher Education sector in the UK. In her current role, she supports healthcare professionals to develop reusable (open, CPD and credit-bearing resources), innovative, learner-centric and multi-discipline learning materials. Cath has a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education, a Postgraduate Diploma in Academic Practice, an MA in Electronic Communication and Publishing, and is a Senior Fellow of the HEA.
John Owen is a Lecturer in Technology-Enhanced Learning with over 20 years’ experience working in further and higher education in both teaching and support roles. He has a background in teaching multimedia computing, educational development and technology enhanced learning, with extensive experience in the development, implementation and evaluation of online and blended learning. John currently teaches on two courses for the Master of Public Health programme - Implementation Science and Digital Public Health. He has a PGCE and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
