The global shortage of skilled programmers remains a persistent challenge. High dropout rates in introductory programming courses pose a significant obstacle to graduation. Previous studies highlighted learning difficulties in programming students, but their specific weaknesses remained unclear. This gap exists due to the predominant focus on the…

"Motivation": Enrollments in Brazilian computing degrees are at an all-time high, but graduation numbers have not increased at the same rate. Moreover, enrollment growth has mainly attracted male students, steadily expanding the gender gap in Brazilian computing programs. Such high attrition rates have a great economic impact and may…

Computer science is a dynamic field of study that requires constant review and updating of the curricular designs in academic programs--in general, measuring the impact of plan changes has been little explored in the literature. In most cases, it focuses only on structuring its curricula, leaving aside several factors associated with important…

Contribution: The main contribution of this study is to gather and report on the challenges faced by IS courses based on the professors' perspectives. Background: Information systems (ISs) area focuses on the interplay among people, processes/organizations, and technologies. As such, stimulating technical and nontechnical competencies are required…

Liberalisation of higher education in Uganda meant opening its provision to the private sector, and also running a public-private mix model at public institutions. Consequently, the composition and needs of the student population at universities have changed due to flexibility in provision of study programmes and access routes. Students who had…

Predictive learning analytics has been widely explored in educational research to improve student retention and academic success in an introductory programming course in computer science (CS1). General-purpose and interpretable dropout predictions still pose a challenge. Our study aims to reproduce and extend the data analysis of a privacy-first…

The need for a knowledge-based society has perpetuated an increasing demand for higher education around the globe. Recently, there has been an increase in the demand for Computer Science professionals due to the rise in the use of ICT in the business, health and education sector. The enrollment numbers in Computer Science undergraduate programmes…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the pre-enrollment attributes of first-year students at Computer Science BSc programs of the University of Miskolc, Hungary in order to find those that mostly contribute to failure on the Programming Basics first-semester course and, consequently to dropout. Our aim is to detect at-risk students early,…

This paper proposes and validates a short and simple Expectancy-Value-Cost scale, called EVC Light. The scale measures the motivation of students in computing courses, allowing the easy and weekly application across a course. One of the factors related directly to the high rate of failure and dropout in computing courses is student motivation.…

This work discusses a nudging intervention mechanism combined with an artificial intelligence (AI) system for early detection of learners' risk of failing or dropping out. Different types of personalized nudges were designed according to educational principles and the learners' risk classification. The impact on learners' performance, dropout…

With the removal of the barriers of time and distance, E-learning platforms have attracted millions of learners, but these platforms are experiencing a significant drop-out ratio. One of the primary reasons for this problem is the lack of motivation among the learners because of the similar learning experience provided to them despite their…

Although digital advances have enabled hundreds of universities to offer massive open online courses (MOOCs) to millions of students worldwide, the high dropout rate on these MOOCs indicates a disjunct between the potential of the offer and the success of its uptake. Many studies point to issues relating to interpersonal connection as a major…

Background: People who are racialized, gendered, or otherwise minoritized are underrepresented in computing professions in North America. This is reflected in undergraduate computer science (CS) programs, in which students from marginalized backgrounds continue to experience inequities that do not typically affect White cis-men. This is especially…

Background and Context: In line with interest in recruiting underrepresented groups to CS studies, our study dealt with Israeli Hasidic young women who successfully studied CS at an academic institute. Objective: We investigated what factors governed Hasidic young women's decision to enrol in a CS program and shaped their studying experience.…

In this paper, we present our experience with redesigning an introductory computer science course for (electrical) engineers with blended learning concepts. It is a large mandatory course with eight credit points over the course of two semesters, where first year electrical engineers learn how to program with Arduino, C and Python. Additionally,…