"Online coding tutorials are increasingly popular among learners, but we still have little knowledge of their quality. To address this gap, we derived several dimensions of pedagogical effectiveness from the learning sciences and education literature and analyzed a large sample of tutorials against these dimensions. We sampled 30 popular and diverse online coding tutorials, and analyzed what and how they taught learners. We found that tutorials largely taught similar content, organized content bottom-up, and provided goal-directed practices with immediate feedback. However, few were tailored to learners' prior coding knowledge and only a few informed learners how to transfer and apply learned knowledge. Based on these results, we discuss strengths and weaknesses of online coding tutorials, opportunities for improvement, and recommend that educators point their students to educational games and interactive tutorials over other tutorial genres."
Ada S. Kim and Andrew J. Ko. 2017. A Pedagogical Analysis of Online Coding Tutorials. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 321-326. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3017728
1. SUMMARY
The paper sampled 30 popular online coding tutorials and revealed that tutorials largely share similar content, bottom-up organization, and goal-directed practices with immediate feedback. However, very few was able to leverage learners’ prior coding knowledge. The paper then proposes several opportunities for improvements.
2. STRENGTHS
The paper provides a good survey on the existing landscape of online coding education.
3. WEAKNESSES
- The paper did not discuss specifically on how 24 pedagogical dimensions were generated (simple workshop based style was used). The lack of academic rigor in constructing the pedagogical dimensions together with binary scoring cause serious concerns with metric inflation, duplication, and other accuracy issues. Ultimately, those issues severely weaken the claim of “most online coding tutorials are still immature and do not yet achieve many key principles in learning sciences”.
- The paper identified 7 trends in coding tutorial pedagogy but 6 of them are not hard to be noticed. Anyone who takes online courses at EdX, Coursera, etc at the same time should be able to recognize those patterns.
- Platform popularity should only be measured by number of unique and active students registered with the system.
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