Project Based Learning + Agile Instructional Design = EXtreme Programming based Instructional Design Methodology for Collaborative Teaching

Abstract

In the last years, the use of ICT in teaching and learning activities is widespread and “Course design has developed from a craftsmanship-like process to a structured production, which involves interdisciplinary teams and requires more complexcommunication skills.” [Botturi 2006], making methods and modeling languages more and more important. Many instructional design methods have been developed in the last years, but they seem to be inadequate if applied in the context of the 21th century school. In fact, nowadays, new skills for students are requires, like to be able to perform social usefulactivities or to collaborate to solve real problems [De Vincentis 2007, Pearlman 2009,Pearlman 2010], which, in turn, make it necessary that learning and values in the nationalinstruction programs naturally embody and encompass these new activities. These yields other problems to be faced, like the students and parents’ satisfaction, the administrativetransparency and the effectiveness of the documentation, the need for cooperation among the teachers of a team. In this paper we map both the principles of Agile methodologiesand the features of eXtreme Programming method (XP) into a new agile instructional design methodology which is suitable to solve the previous problems: it redefines the roleof the teacher and introduces a new collaborative way to design and manage courses; it allows the realization of the new concept of administrative transparency and access todocuments, that we call active transparency.