Bringing Agile to Higher Education: One year on

A year (and a bit) ago, I wrote about building Agile models for Higher Education delivery (see here). This experiment got off the ground with some funding, and after a few iterations of the business model, several groups of learners across different institutions commenced the projects. It is time for me to take stock and consider moving things forward.

To arrive where we started

A year ago, we started by building Microcredentials. Surveying the global conversation about micro-credentials, my colleagues and I concluded that micro-credentials are often poorly designed short courses. Despite the intention to turn these into vehicles of scalable industry-academia (for want of a better term) collaboration, there was scant evidence of any such ambition in the micro-credentials available. Many micro-credentials were assessed through reflective essays and not, as we expected, through work portfolios. The assessment rubrics were, more often than not, defined by academic expectations rather than built around parameters desired at workplaces. It was not uncommon to find micro-credentials that would lead to course credit, despite the policy claim that they would always be less than course credit (hence, 'micro').

Therefore, we built Experiential Microcredentials, applying Agile's modular and iterative structure in design and delivery, bringing workplace competency parameters in assessment and employing practitioners as the 'customer', an authentic audience for the learners to demonstrate their work. We persisted with micro-credentials, allowing us to start the project in the world's fastest-growing higher education market - India - without violating regulatory norms.

And know the place for the first time

Testing out these ideas has taught us a lot. We established the cost benchmarks and recognised the obvious incongruence between project experiences (which are costly) and micro-credentials (which are expected to be cheap). We also learnt that the credential conversation corrupts everything: However much one wishes to discuss the actual learning experience, a credential is always a credential, benchmarked to other credentials and limited by the brand salience and prestige of the university granting it. The gravity of credentials - micro or macro - is hard to defy.

Apart from that, watching the learners negotiate the journey, we learned a lot about improving the experiences. Negotiating the space between Agile and a good higher education qualification is tricky, and we erred on the side of spelling out everything - week by week milestones and deliverables - rather than relying on the teams to figure out how to go about them. The process of estimation and prioritisation, key capabilities that an Agile project could endow a participant, was controlled by the demand of predictability to meet learning outcome requirements within a Higher Ed setting.

Further, our model was to embed these experiences into curriculum. But Indian university timetables are demanding, requiring the students to do a lot more classwork for other modules than would be necessary at a western university. These timetables are somewhat unpredictable too, given different religious and regional holidays which the institutions had to accommodate for. Also, our rather na?ve assumption that one could empower students to operate in a certain way, while the host institution environment may demand the opposite, was somewhat optimistic.

Finally, we discovered the obvious. As the proverb goes, it takes the entire village to raise a child, changing higher education delivery models around an empowered learner needs the whole institution to change. The business model based on microcredentials was too limiting to convey this message. Therefore, we spoke to everyone - the leadership, the faculty members, the students - to enable the change. Agile is a mindset, as they say: It needed a massive effort to recast the educational thinking to be able to make everyone subscribe to this.

Quo vadis?

One year on, I am back to the drawing board with all these insights and a lot of questions. As we revisit the plan, we know that microcredential space is the education's wild west. True, we took this path as we wish to avoid the regulatory maze of different jurisdictions, but going through partner institutions - rather than directly to the students - meant that we needed to deal with these in any case. It is, therefore, time for us to abandon the limiting idea of micro-credentials and to start speaking about constructing fully experiential qualifications, perhaps even degrees.

As we embark on this, we want to refocus on the key principle of Agile - self-organising teams - and construct environments that leave most of the decision-making, particularly that of estimation and prioritisation, to the learners themselves. We have also realised that our efforts to create enlightened workplace environment, with coaching for behavioural development, needs to be more tightly integrated with the project work itself (rather than being 'extra-curricular'). The shift of focus, from working with partners to working directly with learners, allows us to rethink the whole engagement and design a learn-connect-lead cycle into each activity.

In a sense, this is all-new. The design principles are different: The cadence, the roles, the engagement level, the tasks are all very new. It is a completely different project in more ways than one, with Agile being the only common theme continuing through my work.