Analysis of the transition to a virtual learning semester in a college software testing course

Abstract

This report presents observations from two semesters of the same course, Software Testing, within the same department, in different school years. The first semester, Fall 2019, was the last semester completely in-person before the COVID-19 pandemic made it so that our courses changed to a virtual setting. The second semester, Spring 2021, is the most recent virtual semester at the time that this report is being written (in May of 2021). Though the course was modified to some extent for the purpose of it being online, we had a goal for it to remain largely the same. In both versions of the course, there was a heavy emphasis on interactive exercises as a means to increase engagement and performance within the class and in regards to software testing as a whole. The virtual semester gave us an opportunity to try out a variety of new avenues of learning and an exercise in trying to keep consistency from an in-person environment to a virtual one. This report will address added benefits of the virtual settings, consistencies that we managed to maintain throughout the transition, and lost exercises from the course along with ideas of how to mitigate the loss in any future virtual semesters. It will also address feedback from a survey given to students as we consider the results of the semesters.