Managing Students in Hybrid Software Project Classes

This innovative practice paper describes the authors' experiences introducing active learning methodologies into a hybrid undergraduate software engineering project course. On our campus hybrid courses have both in-person and online students participating in a single course taught by the same instructor. The project team adapted the face-to-face class activities to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of an online course delivery environment. Using active learning and authentic assessment techniques, the authors sought to improve the levels of engagement exhibited by online students. The students in this course learn to use agile software engineering practices to deliver incremental software prototypes. The online and in-person students were surveyed at the conclusion of their course to measure their perceived levels of engagement with course activities. Data was collected from two recent offerings of this course. The results suggest that the neither the in-person or online students were not significantly different from one another on most survey responses or most performance measures.