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Agile Curriculum Sustainability: Continuous Improvement

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Abstract

When it comes to implementing a curriculum that aligns with an agile PBL ecology for learning, there are a myriad of elements and factors to consider, and they all impact to some extent on the ultimate success: graduates who can demonstrate the desired learning outcomes and are empowered with agile twenty-first-century skills that allow them to contribute to society with agency. The development, implementation and teaching of an agile PBL curriculum are ideally at the very least a whole-of-institution endeavour, which involves the micro- and exo-systems, but the goal from the beginning should always be to consciously involve all systems in the ecology. Excluding, for example, the macro-system from curriculum and pedagogy exposes the curriculum to the risk of not achieving the desired learning outcomes identified and required for a twenty-first-century supercomplex world. However, we do realise that a fully functioning curriculum in alignment with an agile PBL ecology for learning is an ideal situation, whereby the whole institution is on the same page and ‘every duck is lined up’. This whole-institution implementation represents one end of a continuum, whereas agile PBL implemented in single courses taught by individual enthusiastic lecturers is considered at the other end of the continuum. The case we outline in this chapter leans towards the former, and the idea is that readers treat this as the ideal scenario, as something to work towards. In this chapter, we discuss some of the factors that are involved in an overhaul of the curriculum towards an agile PBL. This is followed by an outline of how to make this practice sustainable and how to create a culture of continuous improvement, so that the agile PBL curriculum and pedagogy stay agile in the long term.

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Kek, M.Y.C.A., Huijser, H. (2017). Agile Curriculum Sustainability: Continuous Improvement. In: Problem-based Learning into the Future. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2454-2_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2454-2_8

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