Assessment and design of instruction for variable-attendance/distance-learning ALN graduate software engineering education

Courses in the software engineering masters degree program at Mercer University are offered via asynchronous learning nets to students who may attend as many or as few face-to-face class meetings as they choose. As part of our assessment program, we investigated the impact of attendance at the face-to-face class meetings on learning outcomes for individual students. We found essentially no correlation between learning outcomes and attendance. The aggregated data used may conceal dependencies on other factors.