Applying Scrum in an Online Physics II Undergraduate Course: Effect on Student Progression and Soft Skills Development

Abstract

The everchanging higher education landscape dictates the need for innovative, engaging, and efficient teaching methods along with promoting soft skills among the students. Scrum’s framework for effective group work and its methodology tools is a perfect fit to this end since it has been previously applied in higher education for enhancing collaborative learning and developing skills such as communication, teamwork, and problem solving. This paper describes how Scrum was used remotely for a small portion of the students enrolled in an online Physics II undergraduate course during the pandemic lockdown period of an Electronic Engineering School. The primary goal was to investigate the feasibility of Scrum under remote teaching conditions as a facilitator of collaborative group learning. A secondary objective was to observe the students’ interactive engagement in distance learning, along with the possible advancement of soft skills. The paper concludes with the result analysis of the feedback collected from the teachers and the students involved in this study.

Keywords

• Scrum
• higher education
• distance learning
• active learning
• soft skills
• group work