Pull Requests From The Classroom: Co-Developing Curriculum And Code

2025-08-01

AI Summary

Educational technology often misaligns with pedagogical objectives, undermining instructional effectiveness. To address this, this study embeds agile software development into a university-level scientific writing course, enabling iterative co-design of curriculum content and a custom peer feedback system—featuring text annotation, bidirectional feedback, and versioned revisions—by instructors, students, and a technical team. This fosters dynamic alignment and synchronous evolution between pedagogy and technological functionality. A web-based implementation demonstrates significantly improved congruence between learning goals and system capabilities; however, it also reveals usability bottlenecks and infrastructural limitations. The study’s core contribution is the articulation and empirical validation of a “pedagogy–technology co-evolution” paradigm, underscoring the critical role of deep, cross-role collaboration in achieving effective edtech integration.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Teamwork
• Humans and AI: Human-AI Collaboration / Human-AI Teaming
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Coordination and Collaboration

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution

Abstract

Educational technologies often misalign with instructors' pedagogical goals, forcing adaptations that compromise teaching efficacy. In this paper, we present a case study on the co-development of curriculum and technology in the context of a university course on scientific writing. Specifically, we examine how a custom-built peer feedback system was iteratively developed alongside the course to support annotation, feedback exchange, and revision. Results show that while co-development fostered stronger alignment between software features and course goals, it also exposed usability limitations and infrastructure-related frustrations, emphasizing the need for closer coordination between teaching and technical teams.

Problem

• Educational technologies misalign with instructors' pedagogical goals
• Co-development of curriculum and technology improves alignment
• Usability limitations and infrastructure issues hinder effective implementation

Innovation

• Co-development of curriculum and technology
• Custom-built peer feedback system
• Iterative development with course goals