Effectiveness assessment of tele-taught vs. traditional courses of a 3-year university degree in computer science engineering

This paper aims at perform an effectiveness assessment of tele-taught university courses, based on quantitative data regarding fully cohortes of students. The assessment works up by analyzing grades coming from the traditional and tele-taught courses to bring out differences in objective effectiveness of both the methodologies. Since more than 5 years, all courses of a 3-year University degree in Computer Science Engineering at the University of Padua have been taught in 4 geographically distributed sites using real-time simultaneous tele-teaching technologies. Main differences between tele-taught and traditional lessons are: exploitation of new technologies (distributed network infrastructures, high quality multimedia transmission, etc.); the number of students attending in teleteaching classrooms are fewer than the traditional ones; and the tutor presence, who helps and supports students with practice sessions. The paper begins with the description of the tele-teaching platform and the teaching approach, because the roles of both teaching people and technolgies underlie the assessment analysis. On this background the methodology of the assessment is described and finally the analysis. Results highlight the same effectiveness of both tele-taught and traditional lessons: performance differences among students are mainly due to their high school of origin. The experience at University of Padua reveals the soundness of its own teleteaching approach in order to fulfill the needs of commuter students, saving the daily travel time from home to University main site.