Agile Research Studio (Model)
Agile Research Studios is a new socio-technical model for research training consisting of processes, tools, and social structures for orchestrating research training within research communities of practice in which students collaborate to learn and conduct research and develop their abilities to be more self-directed. ARS (1) adapts agile processes to research training so students learn to more effectively plan authentic research inquiry and (2) makes effective use of the expertise and resources across the research learning community to support research progress. We argue that by more fully leveraging the support of the research community, this approach will allow more students to engage in authentic research activities and produce research.
Figure 1: Screenshot of a spreadsheet prototype of a project team’s sprint log. The top half of the sprint log provides an overview of commitments, hours spent, and progress on the current sprint. Students plan their sprints in the bottom half by recording high-level deliverables, or stories, and the tasks for accomplishing those stories. Students use a point system to estimate required effort to avoid committing more time than they have available for the sprint. As students make progress they mark tasks as done, backlogged, or in progress and record hours spent. Students also link to useful resources next to stories and tasks.
Figure 2: Helping graph from DTR, Winter 2016. Each node represents a student and links represent fulfilled help requests. Students helped and received help from both students in their own SIG (same color node) and across the studio.
Publications
Team
Faculty
- Haoqi Zhang
- Matt Easterday
- Liz Gerber
Ph.D. Students
- 🎓 Leesha Maliakal Shah
Masters and Undergraduate Students
- None