Abstract:

In the age of omnipresent technology-supported education and ubiquitous e-learning based on numerous contemporary educational technologies, many university courses and entire programs are delivered entirely or partially online, and various courses in computing and computer science related to software development as well as the modern field of data science are no exception. This was even more emphasized in this situation of a global pandemic, in which the everyday work and class environment had to be suddenly replaced with a home office, or, in this case, a home learning environment. As a consequence, the educational paradigm of delivering instruction-intensive courses shifted from a traditional in-person environment within the computer-equipped classrooms, with the instructor or teaching assistant physically present and interactively helping students with the in-class assignments on the lab computers, to the alternative in which most of the work must be done on servers and in the cloud or, more frequently, on personal computers owned and administered only by students. However, even under such circumstances, we provided many of our courses in a blended or hybrid format in an effort to take advantage of both teaching paradigms.

Since our university, with the main campus in the USA and several international campuses, is well-known for providing online course delivery for decades, this was not precipitousness, but it introduced a new set of challenges. Our experience with the delivery of software development courses is mostly related to programming and databases within the Web and Mobile Computing (WMC) undergraduate BS program at two international campuses, as well as our new graduate MS program in Information Sciences and Technologies (IST). Our institution, with campuses located in two cities in Croatia, has extensive experience in providing synchronous distance delivery of many software development courses as well as some elective courses within our WMC program, with students present at one campus while the instructor teaches from the other. For that purpose, we used remote-teaching computer classrooms with distance teaching equipment and various services, tools, and infrastructures. Additionally, some courses were delivered simultaneously for remote and local in-person student sections in the hybrid joint format, some were provided in real time to remote in-class sections and online students from the instructor's home office, and some, such as the capstone project courses, introduced additional international locations in the US and the UAE, thus delivering this course across three continents and several time zones.

In this paper, we present our experiences and address challenges in providing synchronous online and remotely delivered software development and data science courses combining various distance learning methods, technologies, internal and external services and tools, within our technology-enhanced remote learning environment, resembling the in-class experience as much as possible to realize many out-of-class assignments and projects and interactively communicate with students. We describe some aspects of our approach in delivering those courses, specifically in blended and hybrid formats, and summarize our findings, later applied to our new IST MS program in a blended format. Regardless of the format, we believe that we provide an effective way to teach those courses and offer high-quality education.

Keywords:

Distance Delivery, Remote Delivery, Remote Teaching, Blended Course, Hybrid Course, Technology-Enhanced Learning, Software Development, Data Science.