AN AGILE APPROACH TO THE TEACHING AND LEARNING MATERIALS DESIGN FOR THE COURSE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE FOR PROFESSIONAL PURPOSES

Abstract

The article explores the practicability of employing agile methodology of project management to improve the cooperation way of the faculty in the process of compiling teaching and learning materials for the course of Foreign Language for Professional Purposes. Current research in the field concentrates mainly on techniques and methods of selecting, organizing, and structuring the content, leaving beside the organization of the process itself, which faces many challenges, such as: lack of actual cooperation within the teaching team,  following the traditional ways of designing course materials, treating documentation and planning of the course as a formality.The challenges result in poor quality of university-approved course designs and the necessity for the teachers to construct each class individually, while their efforts should be focused on improving existing content rather than developing their own under increasing study load.The agile methodology of project management, used mainly in the sphere of IT, presents many new possibilities for team work organizing. The Scrum framework is viewed in this article as the one that provides solid ground for enhancing cooperation and improving the content of teaching materials through constant testing, feedback, and adjustment.In this article we analyze and study the main roles, artifacts, and processes stipulated by the aforementioned framework and adjust them to the reality of a university and the needs of teaching staff. The provided examples of developing a backlog of a product, the product being the course materials, set forth the principle of formulating a user story as a skill to be mastered by students.