Just what is agile and lean in the tech education space?
Agile and Lean Concepts for Teaching and Learning: Bringing Methodologies from Industry to the Classroom, edited by leading New Zealand academics Associate Professor Dr David Parsons and Dr Kathryn MacCallum, explores how agile and lean ideas can be applied in teaching and learning at all levels of education.
Once the domain of software developers, these techniques have evolved beyond the IT department. Now entire industries are embracing agile and lean — with impressive results to match, in terms of efficiency and responsiveness.
At its core, Agile is all about innovation. It’s about dealing with uncertainty through incremental work delivered by self-organised and motivated teams that are capable to adapt and respond to change. Agile concepts were developed to increase productivity by working on smaller collaborative projects with more flexible schedules. Lean production practices aim to use fewer resources, minimise waste and maximise customer value.
Leading the Postgraduate Certificate in Digital and Collaborative Learning at The Mind Lab David Parsons says he was motivated to make this book happen by seeing how agile methods were being applied in one of the class sessions that he observed at the specialist education provider:
“As someone with extensive experience of agile methods in the software industry, I was fascinated by the ways in which some innovative practitioners were using agile and lean ideas in the classroom. What I discovered was that while there were many people working in this area, including teachers, practitioners and academics, there was no publication available that drew all these ideas together for a broader audience. That was when we decided, with my co-editor Kathryn MacCallum, to reach out to this community and invite them to contribute to this publication.”
The book covers a broad range of topics, including applying agile teaching and learning techniques in the classroom, incorporating lean thinking in educational workflows, and using team-based approaches to student-centred activities based on agile principles and processes.
Demonstrating how agile and lean ideas can concretely be applied to education, the book offers practical guidance on how to apply these ideas, as well as new concepts that could spark further research and development.
This publication is available in hardback and as an e-book from at Springer.
