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.