Granular or Long: Influence of the Content Structure on Student Interaction with Learning Materials

Learning materials provided to students during remote learning are characterized by different technical forms and interactivity levels. The structure of the materials is often enforced by the tools used for their creation, it could also result from the preferences and experiences of their authors. This article presents the effect of the structure of learning materials on the student's performance as well as the dynamics of all interactions of students with such materials. The experiment used learning materials provided to students for self-study as part of classes from a 15-week database course. The classes were held in the form of weekly lectures and teaching labs. The course comprised several larger sections, beginning with the introduction to the SQL SELECT command. Each learning materials module for this part of the course contained approx. 25 programming tasks which were assessed automatically using the Jobe/CodeRunner environment. It ended with a quiz with random questions of single- or multiple-choice, fill-in the gap, or calculate the result. Before the course started, 88 students were randomly divided into two groups, each numbering 44 students. The first group received learning materials with a granular structure, which were divided into small, thematically cohesive chunks of knowledge. The second group received the same learning materials organized in the manner webpages are constructed (long form), i.e., all the material content from one class was presented on one webpage. This is a solution known, for example, from Jupyter Notebook documents. The deadline for completing one module and taking the quiz at the end of it was one week and was the same for both groups. The self-learning materials replaced traditional weekly teaching labs, but students were allowed to contact the teachers remotely to obtain help or additional explanations. The results show that the structure of the materials did not have a significant effect on the performance of the students, yet they were more involved in learning and spent more time in the course when they worked with granular materials. Their levels of satisfaction were also higher. The results presented in the article may be of interest to teachers when deciding on the form of learning materials to be created.