Teaching Computer Programming in Online Courses - How Unit Tests Allow for Automated Feedback and Grading
english

Edgar Seemann
2014 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education  
Online courses raise many new challenges. It is particularly difficult to teach subjects, which focus on technical principles and require students to practice. In order to motivate and support students we need to provide assistance and feedback. When the number of students in online courses increases to several thousand participants this assistance and feedback cannot be handled by the teaching staff alone. In this paper we propose a system, which allows to automatically validate programming
more » ... rcises at a fine-grained level using unit tests. Thus, students get immediate feedback, which helps them understanding the encountered problems. The proposed system offers a wide range of possible exercise types for programming exercises. These range from exercises where students need to provide only code snippets to exercises including complex algorithms. Moreover, the system allows teachers to grade student exercises automatically. Unlike common grading tools for programming exercises, it can deal with partial solutions and avoids an all-or-nothing style grading.
doi:10.5220/0004939304210426 dblp:conf/csedu/Seemann14a fatcat:gk2du66ypnf6npsfylutzbnpge