A course plan for principles of is programming to withstand covid-19

Abstract

The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has created a no-win situation for educators: bring students back to campus and risk spreading the virus or teach online and risk insolvency. As faculty work to plan even as situations change, they must build flexible course plans to weather COVID-19 while still meeting students’ needs and expectations for teaching at their institutions. We discuss how we quickly and successfully transitioned a Principles of IS Programming course from face-to-face to fully online instruction and how we planned to apply lessons learned from that transition to the next semester. In addition, we describe how to organize courses and course schedules to maximize engagement and active learning while remaining agile enough to shift from face-to-face to online (or even vice versa if the opportunity occurs). We present this paper to help other IS instructors build a course plan to meet student needs for programming courses.