Redesigning an Object-Oriented Programming Course

Abstract

Educational technology offers several potential benefits for programming education. Still, to facilitate the technology properly, integration into a course must be carefully designed. In this article, we present a redesign of an object-oriented university-level programming course. In the redesign, a collaborative education tool was utilized to enhance active learning, facilitate communication between students and teachers, and remodel the evaluation procedure by utilizing automatically assessed tasks. The redesign was based on the best practices found in our own earlier research and that of the research community, with a focus on facilitating active learning methods and student collaboration. The redesign was evaluated by comparing two instances of the redesigned course against two instances using the old methodology. The drop-out rate decreased statistically significantly in the redesigned course instances. Moreover, there was a trend toward higher grade averages in the redesigned instances. Based on the results, we can conclude that the utilization of educational technology has a highly positive effect on student performance. Still, making major changes to course methodology does not come without certain difficulties. Hence, we also present our experiences and suggestions for the course redesign to help other educators and researchers perform similar design changes.

Towards a Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Approach for an Object-Oriented Programming Course

“…Kaila et al [14] worked on the redesign of an Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) Course. Knowledge mediation was carried out through the information and communication resource (CIR) called ViLLE, a web-based collaborative education tool that supports a variety of different exercise types.…”

Alignment of Teaching and Electronic Exams and Empirical Classification of Errors for an Introductory Programming Class

“…Barros et al introduced the term Lab exam for an exam where each student completes an assignment in an exam like environment with special time and space allocation, as well as rigid time and fraud prevention control [5]. Nowadays, the term electronic exam seems to be more common [7], [9]- [11], for which reason we adopt this term throughout this paper.…”

Investigating the Impact of Group Size on Non-Programming Exercises in CS Education Courses

“…Results show that group work improves student achievement for K-12 and college [19]. Compared to working individually, group work in CS courses allow students to achieve higher retention rates [8] and grades [16] particularly for underrepresented students [12]. Furthermore, for CS, group work is important because modern soft-ware is developed in teams [4,21,27] such as the popular Agile soft-ware development approach [18,39].…”

“…Employers understand the need for these "soft skills" and often value them as much or more than technical skills for employees [18,27]. Finally, group work has academic benefits for students and instructors in CS with potentially higher retention rates [8] and grades [16] particularly for underrepresented students [12].…”