Comparing achievement of intended learning outcomes in online programming classes with blended offerings

Abstract

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 ABC's of Online Course Design According to Addie Model

“…In literature, there are a number of experimental studies and related meta-analyses compering online learning and traditional learning (For example, [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. In some of these studies, no difference was found between the two methods [20,21,23,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] while some of them reported that online learning could be as effective as and even more effective than traditional learning (For example, [22,27,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44].…”

Learner Views about a Distance Education Course

“…Some of these studies found no difference between the two methods (Ahmad & Ives, 2001;Bernard et al, 2004;Borthick & Jones, 2000;Driscoll et al, 2012;Friday, Friday-Stroud, Green, & Hill, 2006;Gagne & Shepherd, 2001;Gunawardena & McIsaac, 2004;Hiltz, 1994;Huh, Yoo, Jin, & Lee, 2008;Piccoli, Rich, & Dereshiwsky, 2011;Roseth, Saltarelli, & Glass, 2011;Royse, 2000;Russel, 1999); while some others found that online learning is as much effective as, and even more than traditional learning (e.g. Aly, 2013;Cavus, Uzunboylu, & Ibrahim, 2007;Daymont & Blau, 2008;Farag, 2012;Feintuch, 2010;Jones & Chen, 2008;Lapsley, Kulik, Moody & Arbaugh, 2008;Kose, Koc, & Yucesoy, 2013;Stivason, Saunders, & Price 2008;Zhao et al, 2005).…”

Does language choice influence the effectiveness of online introductory programming courses?

“…This procedure is applied to the four outcomes and on every student in the course to develop an EAMU vector for each ILOs. The EAMU model was proposed in [5] and has been used in a previous research study [6] that compared the achievements of ILOs in face-to-face and online classes. For example, in a C++ online offering of the course in spring 2011 the computed EAMU vector for the first outcome (O1) is [7, 1, 1, 0] meaning that out of the 9 students who passed the course, 7 exhibited exemplary attainment of outcome 1, 1 at the adequate level, one minimal and zero unsatisfactory.…”

“…First, each EAMU vector for each offering is transformed to a scalar value using a devised formula that encourages good performance (E and A) while reprimands minimal and unsatisfactory performance. For details of that formula, please refer to [6]. For each course offering, a scalar value was computed that represents achievement of a specific ILO.…”