In today’s higher education, it is crucial for teachers and decision-makers to understand how students perform in different learning modalities. This allows to explore the factors impacting performance and supports the development of study programs that cater to the unique needs of different learning styles. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis of the academic performance of students enrolled in the face-to-face (FTF) and online (OL) modes fared in an Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) course in the Information Technology (IT) program at Technical University of Manabi (UTM), Ecuador, during the academic year 2022–2023. Our analysis had five important stages: first, we gathered information about who the students are and how they’re doing in class. Then, we cleaned the data to remove errors and fill in missing information. After that we organized the data so that we could understand it better and respect the privacy of the information. Next, we looked for patterns related to socio-demographic and academic characteristics. Finally, we interpreted the results. Our findings show that students who have FTF classes perform better than those who take classes OL. Additionally, we found that age and family income have a big influence on academic performance. Younger students and those from higher-income families tend to have better results in FTF classes, while OL learning shows more equal trends in terms of age.