Takaoka Eiko

Web-based e-Learning has a big issue how to find out possible stopouts in an early stage of the course and to guide them to the desirable goal. This paper represents that we successfully helped the at-risk students overcome their programming phobia and develop the ability to create basic programs by offering a face-to-face class with small-group instruction for them, and the analysis on the relationship between students' lecture records and student activities for a blended-type e-Learning course for Java Programming. Based on the analysis, we proposed a check-sheet for detecting possible stopouts in the early stage of the course, applied the proposed check-sheet to some e-Learning course, and obtained that the proposed check-sheet can be able to detect at-risk students.

We have designed and developed Java programming online course materials and conducted classes in: blended style and 'fully e-learning' style, from 2005 to 2006. We have improved content based on the results of questionnaires and comments from students year by year. We have obtained our online course gave students the educational equivalent of blended style. In this paper, we report that our analysis result related to programming skill. Consequently, we obtained that "remedial course" helps programming skill of students increase and the number of submitting report is related closely to the improvements in programming skill. We also descrive our observations about the ideal form of online e-learning course in future.