Abstract
An online judge (OJ) system was developed to evaluate programs in online programming contests. They have also been widely applied to help students practice their coding skills; however, no studies have investigated the acceptance of OJ technology by students in online programming courses. In this study, we applied the second generation of the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) model and partial least-squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to fill this research gap. We recruited 187 undergraduate participants from the Data Science course at Feng Chia University (FCU), Taiwan, in the spring semester of 2021. Our results showed that ‘hedonic motivation’, ‘self-efficacy’, and ‘social influence’ had the most significant positive effects on students’ intention to use the OJ system. Interestingly, academic majors did not play a significant moderating role between the intention to use the OJ system and other influential factors. However, it exerted a significant direct effect on ‘behavioral intention’. Our results can serve as a reference for OJ system developers, designers, instructors, and policymakers within universities.
Highlights
Programming assignments are important practical tasks in engineering degree programs
Most of the students who participated in our study were registered with the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (IECS) (n=156, 83.4%), followed by students from the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) (n=23, 12.3%)
Our findings add to the existing literature pertaining to the use of online judge (OJ) systems in distance learning
Summary
Programming assignments are important practical tasks in engineering degree programs. Automated programming assessment systems (APAS) have been developed to track the learning progress of students and reduce the workload of educators [2]. Mekterovic et al [3] developed ‘Edgar’ - a novel, state-of-the-art, automated program assessment system capable of assessing (1) programming assignments written in arbitrary programming languages (e.g., SQL, Java, C, C#) as well as (2) multicorrect multiple-choice questions. An online judge (OJ) is a web-based software that was developed to judge uploaded source code in online programming contests [4]. OJs place the responsibility for learning on the student, who may lack motivation or appropriate study habits [7]. While many studies have investigated how to improve the design of OJ systems for programming courses, research into student acceptance of OJ systems is lacking. We aimed to fill this gap by exploring the following research questions:
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