Student-Collaboration in Online Computer Science Courses - An Explorative Case Study

As a result of the current Covid-19 pandemic, a shift in teaching and learning from face-to-face to video-based online instructional settings has also occurred in higher education. For online teaching, strategies are required to allow collaboration and interaction between learners, similar to face-to-face teaching. Therefore, it is essential to identify how students perceive group work in online classes in order to be able to draw relevant conclusions for the design of online classes. This paper examines the learning climate and the perceived key features of collaborative learning in two different computer science courses with (N = 9) pre-service-teachers in computer science and (N = 7) computer science majors which have taken place in the virtual gathering space gather.town. We chose this platform to provide a wide opportunity for interaction, especially during collaborative group work. Even though we can draw no conclusions that the possibility of interaction in gather.town platform had an impact on the learning atmosphere, results indicate that the learning atmosphere was perceived as similar to that in face-to-face courses. Furthermore, the results based on the qualitative content analysis indicate that students perceived a high activation as working better in online collaboration than in face-to-face settings.