Agile Classroom: A Case Study in Adult Education

I’m a co-founder of an education startup. As an Agile Coach, I am determined to practice what I preach and run our business in a very agile way. Today I want to talk about how we apply agile principles and practices to the way we develop and deliver our technical training courses for adults. I should point out that our students learn agile software development practices while they learn programing, but this article is not about that aspect of an “agile classroom”.

We believe that training, like virtually any other product we might sell, requires rapid innovation and continuous improvement. We must constantly assess what we are doing, how effective it is and then adjust quickly to improve the quality of our courses.  We also believe this is a process that never ends. No curriculum is ever “finished” and, with the rapid pace of technology changes, no course is ever fully mature. In fact, I believe a “mature” course still probably faces as much as 10% change each time it is run, to adjust to new learning, feedback from students and the community, and technology advancements.

We are also big fans of the principle: fail fast, fail cheap. If you think something can work in the classroom, try it. Don’t overthink it, don’t waste months trying to perfect it, don’t study the market or competitors to see if someone else is doing. Just do it. Try it as quickly as you can and see if it works. If it does, great. Invest some more effort to build on that success. If it doesn’t work, great. You learned something about why you thought it would work and the assumptions you made that didn’t turn out to be completely accurate. Now try something else.

You may be thinking, your courses must be chaotic and inconsistent if you let the instructors experiment all the time and constantly try new (unproven) stuff on the students. I believe we see something quite the opposite. Our courses rapidly improve because our instructors are not experimenting with the stuff that works well. They are experimenting with elements they believe can be improved on.

Every course is built on a set of learning objectives that are collectively designed to achieve a learning outcome. For example, our coding bootcamp curriculum is built around the learning outcome for students to be an employable junior software engineer at the end of the bootcamp. So, we have a whole set of learning objectives that target skills and experiences the students should have to achieve that outcome.

Learning objectives are relatively stable. Of course, there can be advancements in technology that alter some learning objectives or market pressure from employers requesting that we emphasis some technology over another, but, the instructors are not randomly changing the learning objectives for a course. Such changes would be evaluated and decided upon by committee. What the instructors are encouraged to experiment with are the materials, exercises and assessments used to achieve the learning objectives.

The instructor’s experiments are done in a very agile way. We constantly observe and reflect on what is working well and what can be improved upon. We collect ideas (a backlog of user stories for improving a given course) and then prioritize and commit to changes on a weekly basis (sprints). The instructor team has full autonomy to make the changes they see fit. We also encourage the instructors to personalize components of the materials. By this, I mean, tell your stories. We specifically hire instructors with years of work experience in the fields our students are trying to get into. We want the instructors to be able to share their real-world stories, inspire students and prepare them for the jobs they are targeting. If we dictate the curriculum too tightly we leave little room for the instructors to “make it real”.

We believe this is the true future of education. To truly innovate, we must be agile. We must be willing to experiment and allow the students to work at their own pace, learn from each other, and be inspired, all while getting an extremely practical learning experience that gives them real skills they can apply in a paying job.

I’ll finish with this final principle. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. We strive to be data driven. When I commented early that we “observe and reflect”, I was referring to the processes and tools we are building that allow us to collect and analyze data on how the students are doing. This includes both a measure of their satisfaction or happiness and an assessment of their performance on assignments and projects. We want to measure both their individual progress and performance and the effectiveness of the materials, exercises and assessments. While the instructor’s opinions and feelings about how things are going are critical, because they are personally interacting with the students, we cannot rely solely on their intuition. We must have data to verify what is happening and what areas we should focus on for improvement.

As a startup, we have a long way to go, but I can say honestly that we have made incredible progress and I am truly proud of the quality of the courses we offer and success we have had with student outcomes. If you teach or run a school, I strongly encourage you to be agile in the way you develop and deliver courses.