Understanding Barriers and Motivations of Non-Traditional Students Learning Programming in an Online CS1 Course

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/PoemConference contribution

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Due to the increasing number of computing jobs and national demands, we are seeing a surge of non-traditional students (aged over 25), entering the online CS1 courses. We are at a large metropolitan public research university, where 30% of the students are non-traditional students. However, the online CS1 course usually consists of 70-75% of non-traditional students. We carried out a study in that course for the last 5 semesters where we interviewed non-traditional students to better understand their characteristics and how those are related to their learning goals and performance. This paper is an attempt to identify the unique characteristics of non-traditional students that can help Computing-ED researchers and admins to design online CS1 courses with appropriate pedagogy, so a better learning experience can be provided to them and their retention rates can be increased.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGITE 2020 - Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on Information Technology Education
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages38-41
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781450370455
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 7 2020
Event21st Annual Conference of the Special Interest Group in Information Technology Education, SIGITE 2020 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: Oct 7 2020Oct 9 2020

Publication series

NameSIGITE 2020 - Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on Information Technology Education

Conference

Conference21st Annual Conference of the Special Interest Group in Information Technology Education, SIGITE 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period10/7/2010/9/20

Keywords

  • cs1
  • diversity
  • non-traditional students
  • programming

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Software

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