Abstract:

This study examined the effects of online engagement in live lectures versus offline studies on students’ performance of an undergraduate computer science Databases module with a large class size of over 400 students. As a result of COVID-19, significant teaching activities has moved online at short notice. Despite teaching now returning to some degree of normality, blended learning is still likely to be the “new normal” with a reasonable degree of online content, particularly for very large classes. The traditional view that full lecture attendance equates to better students’ performance in assessments, needs to be challenged. We have discovered that attendance at synchronous (live) online-lectures has very little correlation to students’ performance. Our view is that the change to online learning has caused a considerable shift in study habits. In fact, a significant number of students who had hardly attended any live online-lectures still performed extremely well in the summative assessments, indicating that they were still engaging asynchronously.

One of the first “issues” that was evident from teaching the module, was the poor attendance in live online-lectures. It was assumed that lecture attendance would be high, under the hope that students would be more attracted to attend live online-lectures in the comfort of wherever they are residing. Disappointingly, this was not the case and attendance appeared to be lower than expected right from the beginning. We found that approximately 80 out of 400 students in the entire class had only attended at most 2 live online-lectures. Further studies of these 80 students, revealed an unexpected outcome, that surprisingly around 24 out of these 80 students outperformed the lecturer’s expectation and had actually obtained a first-class honours grade (>70%) on their overall module score, which included an examination, a class test and a project assignment. The ‘normal’ expectation of these lowest attenders would be that they would have failed or obtained a poor grade. However, our investigation showed that this was not the case.

The higher than expected grades of the lowest live online-lecture attenders, shows that the majority of these students are still engaging with the course material asynchronously, as we have confirmed using granular data from CANVAS Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Page views. This is one of the first studies of a large class size (>400 students) looking at the correlation between online synchronous lecture attendance, VLE Page views and students’ overall grades. Previous studies of smaller classes of around 30 students were unable to establish strong correlations between VLE page views and students’ grades, likely due to the small class size.

This study has found excellent correlations, it has gone deeper into the issue and will present a three-part investigation:
(1) Does attendance at live online-lectures have a relationship to the overall student grades?
(2) Can online engagement be measured via page views in a VLE, and how does this relate to the overall student grades?
(3) What are the changes in the study habits of students for online learning, and what are the likely reasons for this?

We can conclude that academics need not be overly concerned with low attendance at live online-lectures, as we have strong evidence to indicate a shift in study habits for online learning.

Keywords:

Academic performance, online education, virtual learning environment, student attendance, online engagement, online higher education.