Online learning has made it possible to attend programming classes regardless of the constraint that all students should be gathered in a classroom. However, it has also made it easier for students to cheat on assignments. Therefore, we need a system to deal with cheating on assignments. This study presents a Watcher system, an automated cloud-based software platform for impartial and convenient online programming hands-on education. The primary features of Watcher are as follows. First, Watcher offers a web-based integrated development environment (Web-IDE) that allows students to start programming immediately without the need for additional installation and configuration. Second, Watcher collects and monitors the coding activity of students automatically in real-time. As Watcher provides the history of the coding activity to instructors in log files, the instructors can investigate suspicious coding activities such as plagiarism, even for a short source code. Third, Watcher provides facilities to remotely manage and evaluate students' hands-on programming assignments. We evaluated Watcher in a Unix system programming class for 96 students. The results showed that Watcher improves the quality of the coding experience for students through Web-IDE, and it offers instructors valuable data that can be used to analyze the various coding activities of individual students.
Keywords: Web-IDE; cloud platform; coding activity; online learning.