To get these templates to show up for your course:
You can set the due date, the opening date (when students can start answering problems), and the date that corect answers are shown to the students. (You can always change all of these things later.)
I usually set the opening date in the past since I'm not wanting to hide the problems from the students (also see the step of assigning users), the due date at 11:59pm on the night I want them to be done, and the show answers date to the same thing.
There is an argument to put the "show answers" date in the future by a couple days in case you want to be able to give individuals extensions.
NOTE: Don't put a period or underscore in the name of your problem set. If any of your problems contain images, then students will have trouble printing them if there is a period in the name of your problem set. The same caution goes if you write your own problems. They will be in files with the ".pg" extension. Don't put any other periods in the problem name. Similarly, if your problem includes an image, it will be a file ending in ".gif" and you don't want any other periods in that problem name either.
Library Browser -> Add problems to Target Set (select here)
then under the "Browse" paragraph the "National Problem Library" should be grayed out since it should be automatically the selection. You can then select Subject, Chapter, Section and click "View Problems". Note that you can select how many problems to view at once, and that WeBWorK needs to compile these problems. If you
Then click on problems you want to add, and then click on "Update Set"
You can also do an advanced search, and search by textbook and chapter, which is sometimes useful, though only a few textbooks have many problems entered. (Stewart is one that has a lot of problems entered, but often for the 5th edition.)
One annoying issue, if you click on a bunch of problems on the first page, and then go to the next page, and then click "update set" it won't add the problems you clicked on on the first page.
I often do "Max. Shown = All" unless there are many hundreds of problems in the category I've chosen.
Hmwk Sets Editor -> Click on the numbers under "Edit Assigned Users" in the row corresponding to the homework you want to assign.
One option on the page that comes up will be the "Assign to All Current Users" which is almost always what you want to do.
[Note on visible/hidden sets. If you discover a problem with a set you have already assigned to students and you need to hide it from them, you can make that set "hidden" in the "Hmwk Sets Editor" (you'll have to make it visible again once you are ready for students to see it again).
If you create a set in the "Library Browser", it defaults to hidden. If you create it in the "Hmwk Sets Editor", it defaults to visible (though in both cases the default is not to assign it to any students).]
There is some pre-made material you can use for various courses. Problems have been written already for Math 106, 111, 112, 241, 242. You can find these by seleting the "Library Browser" and then clicking on "Browse Local Problems" and selecting the appropriate "Local Problems."
Some courses also have sample homework assignments that you may be able to use. These are available for Math 111, 112, 251 as described above under A. of "HOW TO CREATE A HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT.
There are several things you should do to test the assignment.
Consider what you want to tell your students about your willingness to answer email in the hours before the due time.
Note you can test the printability of all your homeworks at once by Homewok Sets -> Download hardcopy for selected sets then select all your sets, and click the "generate hardcopy" button.
Once the problem set is created, if you go to Hmwk Sets Editor and click on the number under "Edit Assigned Users" you can then assign to all users.
The other task that requires some initial work is populating the course with students. We are creating rosters and moving them to the webwork directories for individual courses in the office, but there is still one step that you'll have to do:
That's it.
We'll update the roster file (Math111-23456.lst, or whatever is appropriate for your course) every morning between 8 and 9 am for the first two weeks of class. But we don't have a way of automatically running the "Import users" command from above, so you'll want to do that regularly for the first two weeks.
This will add any new students who register. It won't delete students who drop, so if you care about doing that, you may want to do that by hand once drop date has passed. Or you can just not delete the dropped students. Leaving them on your roster won't do any harm.
One caution: when you add new students, homework sets which were assigned to old students are not automatically assigned to the new students. The easy way to fix this is to go to Hmwk Sets Editor, click on the "Edit Assigned Users" column for the active homework set, and then click on "Assign to All Current Users" at the top of the page that comes up. You'll need to do this each day that you actually add users.
(If you wish to short circuit what we are doing in the office by putting the MathXXX-CRNXXX.lst files into your directory, here is what you would do.
Summary: download roster from DuckWeb, run a perl script which converts it into a form WeBWorK likes, then upload the output of the perl script into WeBWorK.
Adding your entire roster in detail:
You don't actually want this to open in Excel, you just want to save it to the desktop. Also, what you get is not actually an Excel spreadsheet. It is simply a text file (in some version of html) that Excel knows how to translate into a spreadsheet. We're not going to use Excel though.
cd Desktop (and then hit return)
perl html-classlist-duckid hwskclst.P_ClassList (and then hit
return)
(If you are using any other kind of unix desktop other than a Mac, this will also work, but you probably will already know how to get some kind of terminal window. If you have the misfortune to be using MS Windows, you are kind of on your own here, but I'm sure _something_ works in that situation as well.)
Also note that the file hwskclst.P_Classlist is the roster you downloaded, but if you download it more than once without deleting the previous version then the second copy will be named hwskclst_1.P_Classlist or something like that. Etc.
To delete students (careful - this deletes all their homework scores of course) Instructor Tools -> Classlist Editor then select the student you want to delete and click on the "Delete" radio button and then "Take Action."
These advantages come with some potential frustration too.
It is probably a good idea to give your students some guidelines about when you are likely to be able to answer emails, especially on the days that homeworks are due.
It is worth reminding them how useful the "Preview Answer" button is in terms of figuring out if they have really entered what they meant to enter.
WeBWorK doesn't record their answer as an answer until they click "Submit Answer." They can change their answer if their answer was wrong after "Submit Answer" (unless they've used up all the alloted tries).
There are some pre-designed ones, which you can "Import" under "Homework Sets Editor." The ones that have names like set0.def, setDemo.def, setMAAtutorial.def, setOrientation.def are all orientation homework sets. (In fact, if you've never done WeBWorK, it is useful to do a few of these to see how things work.)
The default maximum number of attempts is usually unlimited. But it can be coded into the problem. It can be set on a per-problem basis under Instructor Tools -> Hmwk Sets Editor ->whichever problem set.
Of course reducing their anxiety helps them feel better about the course, do better in the course, and complain less to you. I can't stress this strongly enough. You want to do everything possible to encourage, or even coerce students in working hard on their homework assignments while simultaneously doing everything possible to reduce their anxiety about the assignments - especially in the first weeks when WeBWorK is new to them.
Go to "Hmwk Sets Editor."
Click on "Edit Assigned Users" (that will be a number) for that homework.
Then click on "edit data" for the appropriate user.
Go to "Hmwk Sets Editor"
Select the set by checking the box next to it, and then click "Edit selected sets" and then "Take Action."
Then click on the set name under "Edit all data."
Then click on "Edit individual versions of ..."
Then click on "Edit data for..."
Finally, set the "status" to 1 for correct, 0 for incorrect! (I suspect you could use any fraction between 0 and 1 too, but haven't checked that.)
Go to Hmwk Sets Editor, click on the link to edit problems for the homework, and then click on the "Mark Correct" box for the offending problem.
Inevitably at least one student will mess up their password. To reset the password, log into the course, and go to "Classlist Editor," select the student, and check the "Give new password to selected users" option.
Then click "Take Action," enter the new password on the page that appears, select "Save Changes" and click "Take Acion" again.
go to "Scoring Tools"
select the sets you want.
Click on "score selected sets and save to" (you can enter a file name here if you don't like the default one displayed).
Then the results will be displayed as a CSV file (readable to excel and to OpenOffice, etc.).
To download the file, click on the link with the file name that is displayed.
You can use "create a new set named _____..." from the Hmwk Sets Editor. If that doesn't work:
To record problem sets, you "export" them from the Homework Sets Editor. When you do that, WeBWorK will create a file name from whatever you named the problem set. The file name will have the form:
setYOUR_PROBLEM_SET_NAME.def
So it is nice if you _haven't_ named your problem set something ending with .def or beginning with "set." Something like "Logarithms" or "RelatedRates" seems like a good easy to understand choice.
Sometimes they need to change the "Display Option" (usually near the bottom left for them). "images" usually looks best. "jsmath" is a good second choice. Lots of the others work OK.
This should be available from a link on the page they see when they click on a homework assignment.
We've also had sporadic problems with a page that displays units, so if you assign a problem that cares about units, check to see that the link that describes the possible units works, and let me know if it doesn't work so I can try to address it.
OK, there is a good way to do this, but it is multi-step.
Think about what homework is for. It is practice so that students can learn skills (it isn't a test of skills they've already learned, though occasionally you may give review problems aimed at testing already learned skills).
Multiple choice problems are often coded this way to make them harder to solve by guesswork. I think the additional frustration of not being able to see where there mistakes are erases any possible pedagogical benefit of making it harder to solve the problem by guesswork. Student frustration makes it harder for them to derive the pedagogical benefit from doing the homework.
But if I was committed to teaching my students how to sketch a certain kind of curve, I would do it outside of the homework process. I would have students do a worksheet in small groups, in class on Wednesday (say). I would assign some practice problems (not to be graded) for them to do on their own. And I'd tell them I'll give them a brief quiz on Friday. Obviously this is more work, but it is also more likely to give a measurable result.
Last change: September 2009.