More and more university lectures are recorded or streamed in addition to the in-person lecture. Courses are enriched with practical lessons and additional online materials. All this is done with the goal that students achieve the desired learning outcomes more effectively.But studies on whether and how student performance is influenced by those measures have had mixed results so far, which also depend on the discipline looked at. We report tentative results from two first-semester computer science courses, Introduction to Programming and Computer Architecture, at a German university.Based on the results from after-exam questionnaires, we found different effects depending on the course. For Computer Architecture, using lecture recordings correlated with better exam grades compared to attending the lecture in-person, whereas we observed the opposite effect for Programming. Using lecture recordings in addition to in-person or live stream lecture attendance was correlated with worse exam performance in Computer Architecture. We did not observe any significant correlation of using additional online scripts and student performance. For both courses, attendance at practical lessons is correlated with lower exam grades.Although more data is needed for significant, meaningful results, the preliminary results suggest that supposedly intuitive correlations between attendance, material use and exam grades might not be correct.
