Design and Evaluation of a Collaborative Online Computational Thinking Course

Abstract

For online courses to be an effective alternative to face-to-face courses, they must provide equivalent levels of interaction, engagement, supervision, and support. This paper analyzes and compares the experiences of students in face-to-face and online sections of the same introductory course taught by the same instructor. The course heavily utilizes team-based active learning, and effort was put into maintaining comparable group experiences in the online section. An analysis of student opinions and objective outcomes revealed only minor differences between the two sections. Notably, there were no statistically significant variations in students' overall grades, self reported confidence, or course evaluation ratings, indicating that high quality student experiences and outcomes can be achieved when migrating active learning to an online format.