Can online delivery result in comparable achievement of course outcomes and student success in different computer science courses?

This paper investigates reliable answers to the following proposed research questions: Will changing course contents and difficulty levels affect the achievement of course intended learning outcomes and the levels of students' success? Detailed analyses and findings of a proposed course assessment framework that primarily uses direct assessment techniques are presented. Two online courses are compared, an introductory programming class versus a computer literacy one. The paper employs two different data sets. The first set are collected then analyzed to compare the levels of achievement of Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) across the studied groups. ILO achievement levels are represented as EAMU vectors then used collectively in the comparison. Statistical analyses of these vectors using both Chi-square and t-tests have shown that there are no statistically significant differences between the two groups. The second data set is used to directly measure and compare a number of factors representing students' success. The obtained results for the majority of success measures denoted that there are no statistically significant differences between the two groups except for withdrawal rate and resource utilization levels which were higher in the introductory programming group. Discussions of the obtained results are provided along with how such findings can support the effectiveness of online delivery.