The emergence of online teaching has brought new opportunities to computer coding education. In this paper, we examine how the move online is generating a new kind of dynamic within computer programming classes on an online EdTech platform in South Korea. As the platform seeks to solve some old problems within large-scale programming classes, such as machine dependency and labor-intensive operation, its online classes face unique challenges arising from temporal and spatial separation. The new environment requires that class participants coordinate their actions and relationships with other members, which means technical adjustments and human adaptations. Instructors, students, and managers form a distinctive three-party relationship as they respond to the tricky problems of online teaching, such as the time delay between audio and video transmission. The automation of evaluation labor by the platform also influences the human relationship as well as educational efficiency. Our study suggests that the most challenging task in online EdTech experiments would not be to move classes online completely, but to rearrange roles, identities, and relationships within the class.
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Can computer-coding education go completely online? In the first place, this is a question about moving education out of its physical and spatial context by putting all materials and activities in the online environment. If computer programming, by definition, is something done on and through the computer, then, the logic goes, the people who teach and learn programming do not have to be in the same physical space. Why not connect over the Internet and teach how to code there? This is what Elice, an EdTech (Education Technology) start-up company in South Korea, has set out to do since 2015. Founded by computer science PhD students, Elice created an online platform on which coding classes can be taught regardless of where the instructor and the students are.
Another important aspect of Elice’s online coding education platform is that it grew out of dissatisfaction with conventional coding education at universities. For the founders of Elice, the weakness of coding education at universities was not limited to the fact that it occurred within physical classrooms. Due to the high demand for introductory coding lessons at universities, the classes were usually designed for a very large number of students (more than 100), which required a large group of graduate tutors. In any programming class, the lectures by a faculty member were supplemented by regular practice sessions, in which graduate tutors supervised each student’s coding assignments by going over the student’s codes and revising them individually. This format of one-on-one instruction was tedious and time-consuming, involving as it did a large amount of labor for supervision, evaluation, and complaint management. But, according to Elice, once a platform is able to perform the work of many tutors, conducting coding classes online becomes more plausible.
