Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Online teaching is a whole new world for many instructors. The level of support provided varies greatly from one institution to the next. Various online platforms are available, or things can be as simple as e-mailed assignments and exams. This panel will share their online teaching experiences, discussing both what has and has not worked for them. While they do not claim to have all the answers, they are working from a good deal of experience.

Student satisfaction with distance learning is impacted by a variety of factors, including interaction with the instructor and the structure of the course. In an earlier article, we determined that student satisfaction as measured by course evaluation scores in an online discrete mathematics course taught by the first author was not statistically significantly different from that of students in traditional versions of the same course. In this article we show that vastly different results are seen when the course evaluations for online and traditional sections of Java I and II programming courses are considered.

One the main challenges in achieving consistency in the curriculum is the delivery and coordination of multi-section introductory courses. The mix of adjunct, new, and seasoned instructors, the frequent changes in course content and learning goals, and the non-homogeneous student body are some of the factors that makes successfully teaching such courses a challenge. In this paper we describe how the course mentoring project combines personal involvement with a technological solution to build an effective knowledge-sharing virtual community. Course mentoring has proven to be an efficient way to address and overcome the challenges of teaching introductory computer science courses.