Preliminary Results with a Targeted Online Java Course

ABSTRACT While the College of Computing and Digital Media has offered online courses for 7 years, courses targeted specifically at online students remain in the minority. In this report, we investigate both student learning and student satisfaction with a targeted online introductory Java course developed by the first co-author. Initial results show that this targeted course has equivalent outcomes with respect to student learning and strongly improved student satisfaction. 1.INTRODUCTION The College of Computing and Digital Media (CDM) at DePaul University has offered online courses since 2001 using a system called Course Online (COL) to capture the classroom experience and redistribute it to online students. This approach has been successful in making a wide variety of technology courses available to online students and has resulted in large growth in online degree programs. However, CDM faculty have also experimented with other pedagogical approaches to online courses. Alternative discrete mathematics, computer architecture, and electronic commerce courses were created as early as 2002, although none of the alternative online approaches have been as broadly used as the COL model that is standard to CDM. In this report, we discuss a first experiment with an alternative approach to teaching online Java programming. Materials for the course discussed in this paper were developed in the Fall quarter 2007, and the course was first offered during the Winter quarter 2008. The data mentioned in the sections below are taken from the Winter 2008 offering of the new course and a Winter 2008 offering of the traditional COL model of the course, as well as the Spring 2007 offering of the CO-style course. The new course and the Spring 2007 courses were taught by Dr. Settle and the Winter 2008 COL course was taught by Dr. Marrero.