UHA 4.0 opens the new LAS Programme with its IT development training
Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) programmes recognise the need for true interdisciplinary collaboration in order to identify and tackle the societal challenges facing the world today. Particular emphasis is placed on promoting intercultural awareness and understanding, on the development of critical analysis and reflection, and on the ability to provide leadership and to make articulate and persuasive arguments.
Haute Alsace University welcomed the new academic year by kicking off its innovative IT Development Training Programme UHA 4.0, with a one-week Scrum course as part of the brand-new LAS course-programme.
29 students – of which 15 job seekers – have been enrolled in the IT developer professional bachelor’s degree. This 2-year- programme has been made possible by the collaboration of the Grand-Est Region and Pôle Emploi.
If you’re Epicurious to know what the UHA 4.0 training programme has to offer, you will find below all the relevant information.
What is this programme about?
This programme promotes an innovative teaching method. 37 students (29 UHA’s students and 8 from other EPICUR partner universities), were required to work in small groups to carry out a remote challenge of creating and managing two interactive projects by using professional IT tools. The objective of this challenge was to learn how to work with the Agile Method “Scrum”.
What is an Agile method?
An agile method is based on setting short-term objectives. Therefore, the project is divided into several sub-parts and each part is assigned to a particular team. The teams must set objectives that have to be achieved progressively and readjusted to meet the project expectations.
Scrum is an agile method that relies on a self-organizing, cross-functional team. The scrum team is self-organizing in that there is no overall team leader who assigns tasks or decides how to solve problems. Those are issues that are decided by the team as a whole. In Scrum, a team is cross-functional, meaning everyone is needed to take a feature from idea to implementation.
The Scrum 4.0-LAS project:
Within the Scrum framework, the students were asked to work on two projects.
The project for the English-speaking students (including students from four partner universities Freiburg, Amsterdam, Strasbourg and, Thessaloniki): In this project, students are asked to produce an origami movie that consists of using origami figures (made by the students) to animate the short movie.
The French-speaking students are required to work on a short video that presents the UHA 4.0 Programme.
All groups have to document their projects and respect all the rules and steps of the Agile Method.
The link of the projects:
What is special about this programme?
The UHA 4.0 training program stands out by its active and practical pedagogy and its project-based learning method.
During this programme, each class is required to work on a project called “fil rouge”, in which they can alternate between lectures, online self-learning courses, peer support and the development of a personal project. The lectures are given by engineers who mentor the training courses.
The structure of UHA 4.0 programme is original: the students are not required to take courses nor to pass exams. They can simply assess their skills during the development of projects.
The students have the opportunity to get an inside look at a professional environment through a real company experience, alongside the support of professional coaches during the whole programme.
UHA 4.0 and EPICUR
UHA 4.0 is innovating with the collaboration of the pedagogical team and UHA first-year students in the EPICUR project (The European University Alliance).
EPICUR’s main objective is to create bridges between European students and facilitate learning through innovative training. UHA 4.0 is taking part in the implementation of this objective by proposing a training programme with enriched courses and real project experiences.
Students feedback
The students who participated in this program appreciated and enjoyed this unique experience that gave them the opportunity to get to know each other and to understand the tools of the agile method from a new perspective.
“I discovered a new way of collaboration among an international team”
“I really liked the idea of creating an origami video in order to learn by doing the scrum framework/agile method”
“The course took up a lot of time during the day, researching additional material on the SCRUM/Agile methods. I spent, more or less, 20 hours of work this week for the project, but the time was passing very pleasant”
“I think that our team worked really well during the week, we had very little to no difficulties”
