research-article

Help Supports during Online Delivery: Student Perception and Lessons Learnt from an Online CS2

Authors:

Andrew Jiang,

Bogdan SimionAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCSE 2022: Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 1

Pages 105 - 111

https://doi.org/10.1145/3478431.3499369

Published: 22 February 2022 Publication History

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Abstract

With the shift to online delivery, instructors looked to provide comparable help supports for students, especially for first-year learners who need timely assistance the most. Our work aims to understand student help seeking behavior and perception of getting help in an online CS2 course.

First, we analyze how much students ask for help and perceive to get help in several help support components: lectures, labs, instructor office hours, and on the discussion board. We find that while students take advantage of all help resources, the discussion board is predominantly the main source of help, while instructor office hours run into scalability problems. Secondly, we explore whether asking for and getting help are correlated with grades and find an inverted-U quadratic relationship in both cases. This indicates that low-performing and high-performing students ask for the least help and perceive to get the least help in each of the help support components. Finally, in each help context, we investigate which categories of questions students seek help the most with, and who students rely on most for help.

Our analysis is intended to help educators better understand how to support first-year students in an online course and we hope that our findings are also useful for help support planning once in-person learning resumes.

References

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Ko SStephens-Martinez KZahn MVelasco YBattestilli LHeckman SStone JYuen TShoop LRebelsky SPrather J(2025)Student Perceptions of the Help Resource LandscapeProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701851(596-602)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641554.3701851
Ramirez Osorio VZavaleta Bernuy ASimion BLiut MStone JYuen TShoop LRebelsky SPrather J(2025)Understanding the Impact of Using Generative AI Tools in a Database CourseProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701785(959-965)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641554.3701785
Zhang LChen TMa YNiu J(2022)An Online Learning Help Approach based on Q&A sites in Programming Course2022 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE)10.1109/TALE54877.2022.00014(31-37)Online publication date: Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE54877.2022.00014
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Index Terms

Help Supports during Online Delivery: Student Perception and Lessons Learnt from an Online CS2
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education

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Published In

SIGCSE 2022: Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 1

February 2022

1049 pages

ISBN:9781450390705

DOI:10.1145/3478431

General Chairs:
Larry Merkle
Air Force Institute of Technology, USA
,
Maureen Doyle
Northern Kentucky University, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Judithe Sheard
Monash University, Australia
,
Leen-Kiat Soh
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
,
Brian Dorn
University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 22 February 2022

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SIGCSE 2022: The 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

March 3 - 5, 2022

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Ko SStephens-Martinez KZahn MVelasco YBattestilli LHeckman SStone JYuen TShoop LRebelsky SPrather J(2025)Student Perceptions of the Help Resource LandscapeProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701851(596-602)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641554.3701851
Ramirez Osorio VZavaleta Bernuy ASimion BLiut MStone JYuen TShoop LRebelsky SPrather J(2025)Understanding the Impact of Using Generative AI Tools in a Database CourseProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701785(959-965)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641554.3701785
Zhang LChen TMa YNiu J(2022)An Online Learning Help Approach based on Q&A sites in Programming Course2022 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE)10.1109/TALE54877.2022.00014(31-37)Online publication date: Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE54877.2022.00014
Ko SStephens-Martinez K(undefined)Rethinking computing students’ help resource utilization through sequentialityACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/3716860
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3716860

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Help Seekers vs. Help Accepters: Understanding Student Engagement with a Mentor Agent

Assisting online helpers

Implementing Service-Learning Through an Online Graduate Course in Instructional Design

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