Slides
Teaching online programming courses has many challenges. Due to large numbers of students in online programming classes, instructors are not able to offer individual help to each student as in traditional class. To improve students' learning experience, we realize that a successful online programming course needs to have effective educational tools for students to learn and practice programming skills by themselves. Secondly, students are usually from many different backgrounds. Therefore, besides teaching programming basics, instructors need to better understand students' problems and carefully design course materials to accommodate their needs. We study students' problems by analyzing students' programs from previous online course sessions to find common programming misconceptions and mistakes. We built several useful educational programming tools based on the results we studied from students. Some of these tools have been deployed in class and have had very good feedbacks. In this talk, I will give an overview of my research and brief introductions to the projects.