Abstract:

Databases is one of the fundamental topics in any computer science related curriculum. In the current world with big data and data storage and manipulation becoming more and more important, it is highly important to teach students the proper techniques for storing the data starting from the introductory courses. Still, the study methodologies applied in the courses are studied far less than the introductory programming courses.

In previous studies we have shown that passing rates and grade averages can be improved significantly in various computer science courses by applying educational technology appropriately. As a result, a methodology called Tutorial-Based Learning has been developed. In the methodology, part of the lectures are replaced with automatically assessed tutorials, which emphasize student collaboration and active learning. When accompanied with learning analytics provided by the ViLLE tool, the teachers can both, improve learning and track the student progression throughout the course in detail. In this paper, the application of Tutorial-Based Learning into a Databases 101 course along with results of the utilization are described in detail.

The paper describes changes in students' grades in final exam after the methodology is applied in the course. The changes in student performance (measured with pass rates and grade averages) are compared to two previous and traditionally held instances of the same course. By implementing four two-hour tutorial sessions instead of traditional lectures, we managed to halve the courses dropout-rate while still increasing the grade average of the students who passed the course. The paper is concluded by providing ideas for the future studies and tips for other educators and researchers for applying the methodology (or similar methodologies) in their courses.

Keywords:

Education, databases, tutorial based learning.