Toward an Innovative Educational Method to Train Students to Agile Approaches in Higher Education: The A.L.P.E.S.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I think that this is a very clear accesible description of integrating technologhy into education. Th authors have presented a very detailed account of the teaching approach's specifics and how it works. However, I would like the authors to engage with the evaluation data a bit more and come up with some expicit suggestions for readers who are interested in applying the approach in their educational practice.

I suggest that the authors reflect on what they have learnt from students' evaluation and present on what strengths the students think the approach may have and what elements of the speech may need adaptation when the approach is applid in specific contexts.

I also like to suggest that the authors conclude with clear messages for readers to take home with regarding how they can implement the approach and what they need to be aware of when implementing this approach in their own contexts. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

Thank you for your analysis. Here are our comments related to your review and to the changes we made in the new version of the manuscript :

1. Comments :

• integrate some explicit suggestions for readers who are interested in applying the approach in their educational practice
• conclude with clear messages for readers to take home with regarding how they can implement the approach and what they need to be aware of when implementing this approach in their own contexts.

Answer :

We have tried to clarify this point in the section "4.2. course creation process" with Figure 4 illustrating the course session creation steps.
The explanation we provide over this process balance between the reality of a specific course and a level of abstraction that can include several courses.
What we recommend is to apply the presented process in 5 steps : Defining pedagogical objectives ; Organization of the objectives ; Creation of the User Stories (adaptation in case the course was already used) ; Consistency check ; Creation of the planning board.
This process has already been applied and sometimes there are specificities related to the type of the course or the level of the students.
Several suggestions on creating and transforming courses into A.L.P.E.S. are mentioned and explained in sections 5 and 6. Those sections contain feedback from teachers who were formed to A.L.P.E.S. and applied the approach into their courses.

2. Comments :

• What we have learned from students' evaluation.

Answer :

In the previous articles [3,4] mentioned in the context, we focus conclusion we can make on this approach applied in a specific context, without really explaining the process (the contribution is driven by a course example). The article presented here actually focuses on the implementation of the approach in a more generic meaner.
We have added a sentence at the beginning of the conclusion to support this choice.
From our experience and without a clean and formal evaluation of our activities, the approach is well appreciated from all the actors, its permit to get a better commitment of the students and to address notions on project management in courses not dedicated to those notions, in a cross-disciplinary perspective.
However, we plan in future works to cross the experiences of several teachers in different contexts to better highlight the strength weaknesses of the approach in a well-driven study. Every person who wan to join us to participles in this large experiment is welcome.

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a well-written and structured paper that has a good flow. The paper gives a good description of the theoretical background of the research (project-based learning, agile project management, agile approaches in higher education, description of the A.L.P.E.S method).  

Although the topic itself is not novel, the implementation of the A.L.P.E.S approach into agile project-based courses on database management can be considered quite beneficial. 

Although the article is technically correct, the paper would be much stronger if it compared the results with other existing studies in this area (this should be explicitely written in the conclusions).

However, the text contains a lot of misprints and/or spelling mistakes, e.g., lines 52, 79, 102, 108, 109, 116 (throw → through), 124, 240, etc. I strongly recommend check and correct it.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

Thank you for your analysis. Here are our comments related to your review and to the changes we made in the new version of the manuscript :

1. Comment :

• the paper would be much stronger if it compared the results with other existing studies in this area (this should be explicitely written in the conclusions).

Answer :

We have added a sentence from the perspective of the conclusion.
In our experience, evaluating and comparing approaches is a difficult task for at least two reasons. Firstly, because if we compare the application of a methodology, we have to isolate one group per method. It is complicated to do this kind of study in the same course, with the same level of students. Secondly, it is not possible to compare only the results without taking into account the evaluation design because each study, when evaluated, uses its own protocol.
However, in future work we plan to compare several methods. This requires the construction of a study over several environments and several years.

2. Comment :

• the text contains a lot of misprints and/or spelling mistakes.

Answer :

We review the article and correct a lot of these mistakes.