Student Engagement in an Online Software Engineering Course

Abstract

Engineering instructors often rely on lectures as their primary mode of instruction even in project courses. In the lecture mode of instruction student engagement with the course material is often low or non-existent. Many engineering educators regard experiential learning as the best way to train the next generation of software engineers. For the past five years, one of the authors has taught a junior level software engineering course using active learning methods in a flipped classroom setting. During this past year, the COVID-19 lockdown prevented in-person delivery of this course. The challenge facing engineering faculty everywhere is figuring out how to include active learning experiences in online course delivery. This paper describes the authors' experiences introducing active learning methodologies into a junior level online software engineering course. The project team carefully considered the active learning course materials used in the in-person delivery of this course and adapted them to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of an online course delivery environment. Most importantly, a comparable online course delivery alternative needed to include zoom video class sessions containing live active learning exercises. The investigators compared the levels of student engagement between previous in-person offerings of the course with the online adaptation of the same course. Student engagement data was collected from each style of course delivery. In some cases, this data was supplemented by observational data and with Canvas course analytics. We found that students in both course settings were least engaged when listening to short lectures (either live or video recordings) and felt most engaged when involved in small group activities (either in person or in Zoom sessions with breakout rooms).