Abstract:

Since 2020, the COVID pandemic has forced universities to change their teaching style from the classroom to online and lately to hybrid as students are claiming their right to follow lectures from home. Even the group of teachers can be split into those that prefer teaching in the classroom to those that have come to enjoy the convenience of teaching from their homes. Over the last three years, different teaching and learning scenarios have pervaded life at university.

This paper examines the achievement of competency goals of the current graduating class of 2022 in computer science at the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University by comparing online and face-to-face teaching and differentiating between learning modules and competency dimensions. A comparison is drawn using data across the last three years.

The survey of self-evaluation (Braun, 2012) on a list of competencies is employed. It covers three years of the Computer Science Bachelor Program and explores the usefulness of this type of long-term quality measurement and the effect of the pandemic on perceived learning outcomes. The survey is taken several months before graduation and takes between 30-60 minutes to complete, as it covers 42 learning outcomes across all three years.
The University has 12 subsidiaries with around 35000 students across the state with several thousand Computer Science Majors. Despite these large numbers, the return rate is usually low because of its length, and we focus on the larger groups of responses from 4 subsidiaries, for a total of 59, 53, and 64 valid responses from 2020 to 2022 respectively.

In a previously published study (Berkling, 2022), two cohorts were explored that are now extended to a third cohort in sequence. While 2020 graduates had participated in 1 Semester of online classes, the 2021 graduates had participated in three semesters online. The 2022 cohort spent almost their entire study online, including their last semester, with remaining online and hybrid lectures.

Results show that no significant changes in distributions of self-rating from 1-10 across the competencies can be measured from 2020 to 2022. Any (significant) dip in 2021, due to the larger spread around similar mean scores, was mostly recuperated by 2022. The same finding applies for overall rating of satisfaction by students, despite the increase of online teaching with each later cohort, indicating that any beginning issues were recovered.

Results from the survey will be presented in greater detail in the final paper submission answering the research questions below. RQ1 is repeated from last year’s study, and RQ2 looks at the types of skills and whether they might be more or less effectively learned in specific conditions as a function of their Dublin Descriptor level.

RQ1: Are there significant differences in self-assessment of competencies due to online teaching?
RQ2: Are there significant differences in self-assessment of competencies due to online teaching by level of Dublin Descriptor?

References:
[1] Berkling, K., Saller, D., & Winter, C. (2022). Self-Assessment of Competencies by Bachelor Students in Computer Science. Form@re - Open Journal Per La Formazione in Rete, 21(3), 11–24. https://doi.org/10.36253/form-12266
[2] Braun, E., Woodley, A., Richardson, J. T., & Leidner, B. (2012). Self-rated competences questionnaires from a design perspective. Educational Research Review, 7(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2011.11.005

Keywords:

COVID, hybrid teaching, online teaching, online learning, self-assessment, Dublin descriptors, learning outcomes.