In the past decade, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of courses/programs offered online by higher education institutions in US and worldwide. This increase makes it necessary to comprehensively study the effectiveness of these offerings to ensure that they yield comparable outcomes to traditional offerings. This research discusses findings of a multiyear, in-depth quantitative study with the objective of assessing the effectiveness of delivering computer programming courses online and analyzing the quality of this delivery mechanism. The paper addresses several aspects of comparing tradition/blended offerings with fully online offerings. Several data sets are used in this study with primarily focus on direct assessments. Specifically, this research measures the Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) attained by students enrolled in online programming classes and compares them to the ILOs obtained when teaching the same course in a blended format. Moreover, several other students' success and involvement indicators are measured in both cases and compared. Besides, the paper briefly addresses other indirect assessment findings. The employed data sets have been collected over a number of years (from 2006 till 2011) to enhance the accuracy and implications of the reported statistical findings. Generally, no significant differences were found regarding the attainment of almost all of the ILOs with the exception of one that showed better performance, on average, in the online offerings. On the other hand, blended offerings yielded favorable results that are statistically significant when considering other performance criteria such as withdrawal and failure rates.

The growing introduction of online courses and degrees places high emphasis on the need for thorough assessment of these offerings. This paper focusses on researching a reliable answer to whether changing the programming language used in online introductory programming courses from C++ to Java will have an impact on their effectiveness or not. The paper uses four distinct data sets to measure course effectiveness and implements an experimental, in-depth analysis procedure to come up with an answer to the posed research question. The data collected from classes, using C++, constitute the control group while data collected when Java was used constitute the experimental group. The first set uses data collected from students that express their perception of the effectiveness of various online course parameters. The second set directly measures students' achievement of course outcomes and compares the measured levels across the studied groups. The third set compares a number of students' success and interactivity indicators while the last set measures the student satisfaction with the course and the instructor. The obtained results for all studied performance measures asserted that there were no statistically significant differences between the control and experimental groups. Such findings can be deemed significant for IT-programs given the popularity of the studied languages and the fact that the study focused mainly on online offerings which are on the rise.

Although mathematics is one of the essential courses for students in determining college majors, for many students in postsecondary education, mathematics is seen more as a frightening ordeal than a valuable learning experience. Computer science students explicitly use mathematics in many computer science courses. This demands that computer science majors have in-depth math background to become successful in a computer science career. This paper is a report of the initial development of a new instrument to measure computer science students' attitudes towards mathematics. The reliability coefficient, Cronbach alpha value, for the instrument in our study is found to be 0.811 and coefficients for four subscales are ranged from 0.812 to 0.915. These values seem to be very promising for this study.

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