with all the changes occurring in HE in the UK at the moment, not really sure where anything is going. Probably we’ll have lots of change without anything really changing at all. My own interest is about developing a more student centred approach for my own satisfaction.

Besides agile development (and mainly techniques here), I am interested in two theories for educational development. One is an old theory – Constructive Alignment – that lends it self to a kind of test driven development approach. Start by developing the assessment about what you want learning you want to occur, and then develop the teaching activities/goals around that.

The other approach is the idea of threshold concepts, where you use the students to identify those theoretical sticking points, that once learnt shed a light on everything else. Then you work around those until the students are satisfied they are understood. This kind of relates to an iterative feature driven approach in agile development, but lots of risk attached due to the more messy, chaotic journey students may take.

I’m currently focusing on a tool to help model, nurture and grow goal-based learning both within and without educational institutions (ie. I might have a goal for a course I’m taking at University, but my Aunty who is a professional in a related area is also mentoring this goal along with my tutor and some peers from the uni). The idea being, like you say, to be able to help people learn your topic while really helping them learn to learn themselves, in a way that is sustainable in and beyond large learning environments (that doesn’t describe the agile-nature of the way it would be used – like pull-based “next tasks” for goals etc., but this answer is already longer than it should be).

And that work is itself currently focused on getting a sustainable, fun, test-driven code-base for a prototype that I can demo on any device (ie. html5/js based – if you’re interested i the details you can see the current code of open-goal-tracker). I’m hoping to get the codebase to a point where I can demo why I think it’s a step forward (together with all the excellent content-based resources available), and get people interested (both educational coders, and investors).

But given the normal excuses of full-time work and family etc., progress is slow :) Realistically, I’ll be happy if I have a tool (whether it’s open-goal-tracker or not) which will enable me to re-enter education in a few years time and help people learn.

What about yourself? Where do you see Liverpool uni headed in this respect, or your role there… I’d be interested to hear how you see various alternatives functioning in a university, and how the transitions to those alternatives could occur etc. Thanks for stopping by!

I found a few more people on a later post (Agile learning and agile education) and in the years in between, had the opportunity to experiment while working with a group of people learning web programming.

And yes, I do agree that enabling people to adapt their own learning plan is important – see Tip 5: Gradually handing over control of learning. I’m currently trying to put an open-source web application together in my spare time – Learning Goals / Goal Tracker overview to help facilitae individualised learning on a larger scale.

Where is your current focus, Dick? Have you had the chance to be working on other edu-projects since LearnDirect?

You were here first but we are thinking along similar lines, I blogged on agile learning last year at http://www.toolsandtaxonomy.com/2010/07/13/agile-learning-agile-software-development-and-the-mobile-internet/

Interested in your comments. Did you get much pick up on this?

Yes, that’s definitely true in the sense of not deriving exclusively from agile methodology. One of the interviews I did about agile learning, with Dick Moore, draws a number of explicit comparisons between agile learning and agile development methods. So that’s definitely feeding into the discussions we’ve been having in the UK.

Would very much like to extend that discussion to merge with what you’re doing as well…