Combating anonymousness in populous CS1 and CS2 courses

Abstract

One of the causes for unsatisfactory results in first year programming courses, as we have observed, is anonymousness: individual students mostly follow the course without recognition from their peers and their teachers, and this often discourages them. Therefore, increasing the visibility of what happens in the classroom and in the labs, as well as helping the students to know who their colleagues are and how they are performing can be very helpful. We recommend three complementary educational strategies which include video recording the classes and making the recordings available on the Internet to help students to review the lectures, using a web-based learning management system to foster the communication between teachers and students and among students, and increasing the visibility of student work by adopting an automatic grading system for lab assignments which can in parallel be used for self-assessment purposes.