Agile Methodology and Service-Learning: : Experience in Engineering in Information and Management Control Students

The Covid-19 pandemic has generated changes in the delivery of classes, especially in the modality online. Most of the educational institutions were not up to this challenge. Thus, both teachers and students were navigating this challenge under uncertainty. Therefore, these institutions faced difficulties regarding information technologies and how to deliver the contents effectively to the students. One of the potential ways to overcome these difficulties is to implement innovative tools that provide certainty to students through frameworks such as Agile. Agile is a proven framework in software development that allows distributing tasks in sprints with tolerance to constant changes. Additionally, The Service-Learning methodology allows students to get a hands-on learning experience by working with real-life cases and firms. Therefore, the research question is whether implementing one of the Agile frameworks such as Scrum and the Service-Learning methodology would improve students’ content delivery. To test this research question, we evaluated the implementation of these methodologies through a case study based on one course of Engineering in Information and Management Control at the Universidad Catolica del Norte in Chile. Our findings show that this setup increased teamwork levels, time management, and overall work satisfaction.