Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/asettle Recent documents in Amber Settle en-us Sun, 31 May 2009 03:37:10 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/asettle/4 http://works.bepress.com/asettle/4 Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:12:58 PDT Owen Astrachan Information Technology Education Computational Thinking http://works.bepress.com/asettle/3 http://works.bepress.com/asettle/3 Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:03:26 PDT One the main challenges in achieving consistency in the curriculum is the delivery and coordination of multi-section introductory courses. The mix of adjunct, new, and seasoned instructors, the frequent changes in course content and learning goals, and the non-homogeneous student body are some of the factors that makes successfully teaching such courses a challenge. In this paper we describe how the course mentoring project combines personal involvement with a technological solution to build an effective knowledge-sharing virtual community. Course mentoring has proven to be an efficient way to address and overcome the challenges of teaching introductory computer science courses. Lucia Dettori Information Technology Education http://works.bepress.com/asettle/2 http://works.bepress.com/asettle/2 Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:51:53 PDT Student satisfaction with distance learning is impacted by a variety of factors, including interaction with the instructor and the structure of the course. Satisfaction with distance-learning courses also has a strong impact on retention. In an earlier article, we determined that student satisfaction as measured by course evaluation scores in an online discrete mathematics course taught by the first author was not statistically significantly different from that of students in traditional versions of the same course, supporting some previous studies on distance-learning student satisfaction. However, the model of distance-learning studied in our initial work is not the dominant model used for distance learning at the institution in question. In this article we obtain statistically significant results different from the earlier article when a distance-learning course that uses the dominant model is considered. In particular, the course evaluations for online and traditional sections of introductory Java programming courses varied in some notable ways. Amber Settle Information Technology Education http://works.bepress.com/asettle/1 http://works.bepress.com/asettle/1 Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:23:57 PDT While the College of Computing and Digital Media has offered online courses for 7 years, courses targeted specifically at online students remain in the minority. In this report, we investigate both student learning and student satisfaction with a targeted online introductory Java course developed by the first co-author. Initial results show that this targeted course has equivalent outcomes with respect to student learning and strongly improved student satisfaction. Amber Settle