Applying Threshold Concepts Strategies to Teaching Computing Students in an ODL Context

Abstract

The academic success of first-year students’ learning in science faculties is by no means assured, especially in an Open Distance Learning setting with its limited number of face-to-face encounters between students and lecturers or tutors. Therefore, such encounters should be highly efficient in view of the considerable amount of knowledge transfer to students. The University of South Africa (Unisa) makes provision for contact sessions of 15 hours per semester for selected modules in an attempt to elevate the pedagogical efficiency of these sessions by focusing on the threshold concepts as an innovative way of learning. This paper shows that tutorials adopting the threshold concepts approach have the potential to make students academically more successful. The focus of this study is an introductory information systems module that teaches the Python programming language. Our statistical analysis demonstrated that the year marks and final exam scores of the participating students were frequently higher than those of the students in the control group.

Keywords

• open distance learning
• threshold concepts
• learning support
• programming
• innovative pedagogy