Databases is one of the fundamental topics in any computer science
related curriculum. In the current world with big data and data storage
and manipulation becoming more and more important, it is highly
important to teach students the proper techniques for storing the data
starting from the introductory courses. Still, the study methodologies
applied in the courses are studied far less than the introductory
programming courses.

In previous studies we have shown that
passing rates and grade averages can be improved significantly in
various computer science courses by applying educational technology
appropriately. As a result, a methodology called Tutorial-Based Learning
has been developed. In the methodology, part of the lectures are
replaced with automatically assessed tutorials, which emphasize student
collaboration and active learning. When accompanied with learning
analytics provided by the ViLLE tool, the teachers can both, improve
learning and track the student progression throughout the course in
detail. In this paper, the application of Tutorial-Based Learning into a
Databases 101 course along with results of the utilization are
described in detail.

The paper describes changes in students'
grades in final exam after the methodology is applied in the course. The
changes in student performance (measured with pass rates and grade
averages) are compared to two previous and traditionally held instances
of the same course. By implementing four two-hour tutorial sessions
instead of traditional lectures, we managed to halve the courses
dropout-rate while still increasing the grade average of the students
who passed the course. The paper is concluded by providing ideas for the
future studies and tips for other educators and researchers for
applying the methodology (or similar methodologies) in their courses.