Improving Student Understanding of Programming Concepts: The Case of a Scenario Based Approach to Teaching Programming Online

Higher education institutions have adopted the online, blended, as well as the student-centered teaching pedagogies in recent years. This study investigated how to improve the teaching of a programming module online, by introducing an intervention. An exploratory study was conducted, where a discussion forum was used to engage with undergraduate students registered for a programming module. The students were requested to list the programming aspects that they struggled to understand on the module. Custom study content was developed to focus and expand on the topics suggested by students. The compiled study content was in the form of scenario-based discussions of each concept. This research followed a qualitative case study with observations and content analysis methods to collect and analyse the data. The intervention showed some merit because the student pass rate significantly improved after the implementation of the intervention.