A Comparison of Student Characteristics and Student Knowledge of Computer Concepts in Online and Lecture Sections of an Introductory Course

For many years a mid sized university has offered several sections of an introductory computer concepts course by the lecture method and has also offered at least one online section. There has been much speculation about whether there were differences between the two approaches and the students that self-select into each. In January 2008 it was decided to use the same computer concepts test to compare the students and student knowledge levels in traditional and online sections. The pre test was run in January 2008 at the start of the semester and the post test will be run at the end of April 2008. This paper describes the preliminary results of this study. An additional bonus of this study was the opportunity to examine the computer concepts preparation of enrolled students, mainly first and second year students. The results confirmed faculty speculation that students are not adequately prepared.