Agile supports the delivery of complex products which might have many features. A user story is something that represents an important part of the product. In the case of an online course, an example of a user story might be the get feedback story which describes how students receive feedback as they study. The get feedback story can be added to the list of things to be developed as part of a course.

Agile is about developing successively better versions of products at each iteration rather than delivering a finished product all at once. Each version of the product is built upon the previous version, and is usable. This is useful because it allows teams to get early and constant feedback from users - in our case students who will study a course.

Teachers are used to working in teams and Agile is about helping teams work together. Agile teams possess all of the skills and competencies to complete a project, and roles do not matter as much as results.  Any member of an Agile team can contribute to any aspect of course development: for example, a digital learning expert can contribute to course content, and a subject matter expert can contribute to digital learning design.

In Agile, work happens in short periods of time agreed in advance where people and teams work steadily towards completion of a goal. Rather than working until a goal is reached, work stops at the end of the period and what's been accomplished is evaluated by the team. Timeboxes are often called sprints or iterations and can last anything from a day to a month, or longer.

Developing a product of any kind is complex. There are lots of things to be done and keeping track of them is essential. In Agile, the list of things to be done is called a backlog and it's used in each timebox to help teams decide what they focus on next. The backlog is often in the form of sticky notes on a task board (sometimes called a Kanban board) or increasingly, using online tools like Trello which allows distributed teams to see the things to be done and share progress.

When developing a new product it is essential useful to find out what potential users think about it as early as possible. A minimum viable product, or MVP, is an experiment that users can see and experience and is used to help the team learn what works and what doesn't. We will use MVPs to help us develop new courses, and parts of courses, in HaileyburyX.