ARE WOMEN STILL SUCCESSFUL ONLINE?

This paper describes gender differences in a cohort of undergraduate computing students studying a course that is taught flexibly. We consider differences such as online material usage rates, formative and summative assessment completion rates, communication skills, confidence levels, student motivation and learning strategies. The Internet and Web Development course is available as either classroom sessions or as a completely remote online course where students are free to choose how to study and which sessions to attend. The option of online learning has proven to be very popular with the students, particularly those with work and family commitments. We report four years of research (a total of 654 students) using pre- and post- course questionnaires, focus groups, assessment results recording online behaviour of the different demographic groups of students. We continue to find that our online course favours women and older students, who seem to be more motivated, better at communicating online and at scheduling their learning. In contrast, the male students and younger participants continue to need the structure that classroom sessions provide. It is unclear whether women choose online learning because they are good at it, or it is their only option