Agile methodology in education

Following publication is a conceptual article solving the problem of responses to challenges of contemporary education. Contemporary students are often characterized as incapable of holding their attention on the same object for long. Requirements of the labor market are constantly changing, requiring new competencies, skills, work styles from university alumni. Universities have to adopt to these societal changes to remain in demand. The study is aimed at review and analysis of educational approaches created to solve this problem. The approaches reviewed here have a common practice: use of agile methods of project management. Agile is a methodology of flexible project management. Its main specific features are the raise of business’s sensitivity to changes of preferences of consumers and project owners and management of communications with them, ending with perpetual improvement of the end product. Starting in computer software development, agile was quickly adopted by project management and general management on different markets. Yet there has been no such success in transition of agile to education so far. To achieve the stated aim, following methods were used: collection and analysis of scientific publications on agile in education. A part of this analysis was the comparison of conceptually important elements of these approaches to each other and the main ideas expressed in Agile Manifesto. Special attention was given to two of the most discussed approaches: agile teaching-learning methodology (ATLM) and extreme Pedagogy (XP). The analysis allowed for characterising the agile approaches as generally uniform and universal, i. e. they can be applied to different disciplines, despite of disciplines being aimed at theoretical or practical preparation of the students. Analysis of the values of different agile educational programs allowed for concluding that methodology can be easily adopted to solving specific educational problems in the universities practically without changing the central ideas expressed in Agile Manifesto. The originality of the data produced in the survey is based on the following characteristics: 1) the comparison of the main agile principles used in the education; 2) conceptual argumentation of possibility of using agile in university environment; 3) preparation of recommendations for the use of the agile at universities. The analysis of educational practices and approaches allowed authors to formulate following practical recommendations for creating new educational programs. First, applied educational practices should correspond to the values of adopted agile methodology. Second, the iterative interaction between the teacher and the student should become a basis of the educational practices. The result of interaction can be in the form of both student knowledge and changes in educational program.