Adopting an Agile Approach for Reflective Learning and Teaching

Software engineering is concerned with how best to create software in ways that promote sustainable development and maximise quality. We have been largely successful at transferring software engineering knowledge into the industry, however, many challenges in software engineering training remain. A key amongst these is how best to teach practical engineering approaches along with the theoretical concepts behind them.

This paper describes our experience of adopting an agile approach for reflective learning and teaching within the context of our Software Systems Engineering module, aimed at addressing challenges identified with previous efforts to promote reflective practice. Our study attempts to strengthen the use of reflective learning approaches for our current cohort, as well as introducing reflective teaching practices, whereby we examine our teaching approach in order to improve its efficiency and effectiveness. Our analysis of student response to the module shows that it was very well-received by the students, and we were able to collect ample evidence from feedback to support this. Most of our approaches resulted in positive feedback and contributed to improvements in teaching quality, however, we also identified some key aspects in our method that could still benefit from refinement, such as the need for explicit links between learning outcomes and workshop activities, and intuitive design of feedback questions, along with feedback collection frequency. We plan to incorporate these additional updates into the revision of the module for the next academic year, and to continue collecting and analysing feedback data for further enhancement.