Students' Engagement in Collaborative Active Learning - Online v.s. Face-to-Face

Teaching programming-intensive courses in a virtual space brings new opportunities for active learning and student engagement. This poster presents our experience in designing an online active learning environment in two programming-intensive courses delivered in a hybrid modality with all students alternating between online synchronous and face-to-face class meetings. We present the course strategies that support online active learning and a comparison of students' engagement between online and Face-to-Face (F2F) group activities. We highlight our active learning strategies including dynamic breakout room configuration and online group programming collaboration. A survey study is used to investigate how students' engagement in group activities varies between the two settings. Preliminary results show that the students' responses are highly positive over two engagement factors, the values of activities and their personal effort, with no statistically significant difference found between the two modalities.