Impact of Course Scheduling on Student Performance in Remote Learning

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a need to change course syllabi in order to completely transition to a remote learning model. In the case of subjects comprising programming tasks, taking into account the availability of tools and resources that provide opportunities for independent work without teacher supervision, it was necessary to decide whether students should be allowed to work under self-paced learning, or, similar to traditional classes, fixed-schedule learning. Experiences from MOOCs demonstrated that course scheduling is not without impact on the learning process, and may affect the level of student satisfaction with the course. This study determines how course scheduling affected the performance of students attending a database course. The students were divided into two groups, and completed the first module without teacher supervision. During the learning process, they solved programming tasks which were assessed automatically, and then took quizzes to verify what they learned. One of the groups worked with the materials and took the quizzes in accordance with a schedule, and the other group did so without any time constraints. The results demonstrate that students perform better when working under the fixed-schedule model, without any impact on their level of satisfaction with the course. The system of learning not only affected the quiz results in the module where different scheduling was used, but student performance in later parts of the course as well. The results presented in the paper should be of interest to teachers designing remote courses involving self-learning.