EVALUATING THE QUALITY OF STUDENTS ACTIONS IN A DISTANCE LEARNING PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE

摘要

Online learning (OL) has grown in importance as a direct consequence of the rapid development taking place in information and communication technology (ICT). This development has pushed OL agents into finding new methods of teaching and learning that could explore the technological media to the limits that ICT could actually offer. Due to the evolution of OL, it is difficult to find a precise and current definition. Nichols describes OL as "education that occurs only through the Web, that is, it does not consist of any physical learning materials issued to students or actual face to face contact. Purely online learning is essentially the use of eLearning tools in a distance education mode using the Web as the sole medium for all student learning and contact." Though this statement is still valid, the notion of OL has evolved to include aspects such as collaborative learning, connectivist learning and online participation. This form of teaching and learning is very often based on the principles of student-centered learning; learning flexibility (spatial, temporal); and online interaction, in particular, asynchronous interaction, which blurs the temporal barriers imposed by communicational synchronism, and is consistent with the flexibility principle. Interaction is absolutely fundamental for the teaching-learning process so that students can effectively acquire the corresponding knowledge and skills. It occurs when students are actively participating in learning activities involving peer-to-peer and teacher communication, be it contributing in a discussion, solving an exercise, analyzing a result, simply exchanging views with their colleagues, or clarifying questions with the teacher. When teaching computer science in an online learning environment, we usually face increasing problems promoting student participation, when compared with other teaching fields (e.g. humanities). Students face natural inhibition in presenting publicly questions or issues that they consider to be of lower value or that expose their ignorance on more technical subject matters. Student's participation is often more than communicating a verbal opinion but to demonstrate a very specific technical issue. In fact, experience has shown that discussions are usually dominated by a small core of students with a greater mastery of the subject areas or who are less inhibited, which results in a reduced level of student participation. To teach how to program with an object-oriented language (like C++) is normally not a simple task. It is especially true when the students do not have any programming background or previous experience with any other programming language. Even those students that are used to program in a procedural approach find some difficulty to change the way they reason to solve a problem under the object-oriented paradigm. This reality is quite recurrent in any programming language teaching class anywhere around the world where the students are on-campus studying. Things can become a little bit more complicated when you have to teach object-oriented programming in a totally e-learning environment. Despite recent advances of electronic technologies in e-learning, a consolidated evaluation methodology for e-leaming applications is not available. Maybe the main cause for this is the complexity that the evaluation of an e-leaming environment demands. Many different perspectives and thus dimensions, in the analysis process can be considered, such as the quality of: learning, teaching, learning environment and interaction. Each of these dimensions can be evaluated according a group of pre-defined and chosen indicators. In the case of interaction, we may consider that the quality of students' interaction is one of the most relevant indicators. This article presents the main results obtained through the analysis of the students' actions while interacting and using the object oriented programming discipline available on the Moodle platform of Open University (UAb) of Portugal to the students of the 1st cycle in Computer Science degree. All teaching and learning activities were developed online (emphasis on asynchronous communication) and this discipline is taught in the first year of the graduation (second semester).