A self-organized team: Managing agile content development for seminars

Regular courses offered in IT and engineering departments at universities around the world have been undergoing considerable advancements in terms of digitalisation. However, approaches to organizing face-to-face seminars, generally more informal in nature, are often less structured. Organizers of these kinds of non-mandatory and infrequent seminars face specific challenges; in particular pertaining to ways of guaranteeing continued attractiveness to the audience, long-term feasibility of the organizing approach, and accessibility of digital materials. In interviews with other seminar organizers and through literature review, we have found that there is often no training or resources provided to assist organizers in the process. This paper reports on the firsthand experiences of a self-organized team of engineering students using agile content development and online tools to overcome the obstacles of organizing seminars. We also present evidence that supports the improved attractiveness and accessibility of developing contents, as well as the feasibility of self-organizing approach. The data demonstrates the organizers' equal involvement in the whole process, and points to their balanced workloads. It has moreover been observed that the time spent on content development decreases over time when following the proposed organization scheme. Our work constitutes the first step toward providing academics with documented guidance regarding the agile organizing process. We intend to contribute some guidelines to high quality seminar organization with increased accessibility.