Feeling alone during online classes? Not anymore with Cocode

With the prevalence of online learning, it is important for the success of the learning process that learners feel engaged by the presence of others who are going through the same struggles. We therefore present Cocode, a system to provide social presence in an online programming class.

Article | Spring 2022

Recent Ph.D. graduate Jeongmin Byun and Prof. Alice Oh in the School of Computing conducted research on a system called Cocode, designed to improve learner engagement in online programming courses. This research was presented at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) 2021 and received the Impact Recognition award.

As online learning has become an important part of our lives, the aspect of social presence of peer learners has come to the fore; this is the feeling that there are others who are listening to the same lectures, participating in the same course activities, struggling with the same problems, and attaining success using the same course materials. While active interaction such as chatting can provide social presence, many learners find it difficult to constantly engage in chatting during classes and so, in many online courses, learners feel alone.

Rather than attempting to create social presence by eliciting explicit interaction from learners, we have devised a system in which normal learner activities, such as typing and clicking, lead to social presence. In an online programming course, this is quite easy, as learners are writing code, running it to obtain output, and checking their solutions against the auto-grader provided by the instructor. In other words, their normal learning activities can be used to provide visual cues for social presence. We have named this system Cocode. As can be seen in the main Figure, while students are engaged in their own coding activity (B), they can see what other learners are doing by peering into their screens (C); and, if they want to zoom in on a peer learner’s screen, they can hover their mouse over that learner and see a more detailed screen image (D). The figure below provides details of the various types of learner activities that are shown, including coding (A), running code with no error (B), running code but getting a run-time error (C), and grading results (D). Note that for A, the code is shown as blocks rather than actual alphabet characters, to prevent possible copying of someone else’s coding solutions.

 

For evaluation, we ran user studies with two groups of participants, one taking an offline class and another taking an online programming class. Figure 3 compares results of Cocode with co-learner screens and Cocode without co-learner screens (similar to current online programming classes). The results show that learners felt significantly more social presence in Cocode with co-learner screens than without, and further survey results show that Cocode learners felt significantly more social presence than in similar online classes with live video lectures, forums, and chat sessions.