Improving the quality of programming education by online assessment

The paper presents an online Java course consisting of a tutorial that provides a high level of interaction and an assessment tool that analyses the code and enables the students to run a suite of predefined tests.The hypertext tutorial contains a lot of interactive, editable examples and many exercises to check the student's progress.In the assessment tool various electronic evaluators check for the conformance of uploaded student programs to coding conventions, proper documentation, compliance with the specification and, last but not least, the correct execution of supplied functional tests.The tool not only provides a tremendous help for the correctors by reducing the manual assessment time by a factor of about 4, but also is appreciated by the students for its immediate reaction, because development times (especially during debugging) can be shortened considerably and students can gain a much higher confidence in the quality of their own program.