Abstract:

“Introduction to operating systems” is one of introductory courses for Computer Science students held at Lublin University of Technology (LUT) during the first year of studies. It is aimed at achieving skills needed during further studies and when accustomizing with complicated ecosystems of modern tools and technologies for distributed networks. Students can learn, most of all, skills related to: operating systems administration; shell scripts; and distributed/system programming in a highly concurrent environment such as modern operating systems.

The global COVID-19 pandemic was the main motivation factor for conducting the operating systems classes online rather than onsite. Thanks to the unique set of regulations and guidelines, Lublin University of Technology took all the necessary precautions to protect the health of students and teachers, taking care of the quality of the didactic process at the same time. When moving to online teaching, the main challenges faced were: dealing with novice students, who need some more care to be taught well (like personal contact with the teacher, help in dealing with a software interface); finding a suitable set of tools that could help overcome the first challenge.

We would like to pose the following research question: Is the quality of teaching of operating systems significantly affected, by moving it to the remote environment? In this paper, in order to answer the question, we introduce the methods and tools used for remote teaching, the supportive role of the LUT regulations, as well as statistical analysis of the collected data - the grades achieved by the 1st year Computer Science students attending the course before and after the introduction of the remote teaching by LUT.

After analyzing the data and the personal experiences we feel that maintaining the quality of education in the remote environment requires a lot more time and effort than in case of traditional onsite classes. Whatmore, students during the classes often expressed opinions that it would be easier for them to learn the subject, when supported by personal contact with a teacher in a classroom. Finally, based on our analyses and taking into account the specificity of the 1st year students, we think that the traditional onsite classes have some noticeable advantages over the remote ones.

Keywords:

Operating systems, distant learning, teaching experiences.