Code in Place: Online Section Leading for Scalable Human-Centered Learning

ABSTRACTCould it be the case that the number of people who want to teach computer science, and have the potential, is roughly proportional to the number of people who want to learn? During the time of COVID-19 we offered a free CS1 class to people around the world. Well-aware of the high drop-out rates reported in many massive open-access online courses (MOOCs), we augmented our course with a scalable, human-centered solution: section leading. Section leaders teach small, weekly interactive learning sessions. We hypothesize that the personalized attention adds a sense of responsibility for both student and teacher which drives learning. We recruited over 900 volunteer section leaders and more than 10,000 students in the class. To our knowledge this is the largest group of section leaders in a single CS1 course offering and the most small group interactions. The completion rate in our class was more than 10 times that usually reported for similar MOOCs. Additionally, 99% of the volunteer section leaders taught through the entire span of the course, showing the potential for large scale volunteer-driven education, and the benefit that teachers themselves derive. We also discovered the potential for replication of this model, as 34% of students in a representative-sample survey indicated they would serve as section leaders for a future offering of the course. This level of participation would be more than sufficient to field additional offerings of the course sustainably. We believe this is an intriguing case study of a model for significantly scaling human-centric CS education for all.