Managing a WeBWorK Course

Here are some basic tasks for people teaching classes using WeBWorK.

• Adding/Dropping/Basic data
  • Add a student
  • Drop a student
  • Change student information you should have gotten right when adding them
  • Change student password
  • Building a Problem Set
• Download scores/view student progress
  • Download scores for a problem set or other data.
  • View how the class is doing on a given problem set
  • See a student's version of a particular problem
• Change problems/data
  • Change a student's score on a particular problem
  • Change a everyone's score on a particular problem
  • Change a due date for a particular student
  • Change a due date for everyone
  • Find out what a student entered on a particular problem
• Misc
  • Change the Message of the Day for a course
  • Bits of advice from other institutions which have used WeBWorK
  • e-mail
  • Who is logged into WeBWorK now?
  • What is a PSVN?
  • What do all of the professor's page things do?

Add a student

This is only for adding a student after the initial course has been made. Administrator's use a different procedure to initialize a course with a class roster.

This is pretty close to being the most complicated operation for a WeBWorK instructor, and it is not that hard. We will go through it in fine detail. Once you can do this, the rest is easy.

1. Click on Add Student(s) from the professor's page (middle column).
2. Start typing in information: Last Name and First Name are clear. Capitalize as in: Jones and John.
3. For Student Id, you can use something like: new3 (where the number is different for each new student), or you can make something else up. Whatever you make up should contain only letters, numbers, and hyphens. It must be different from the value for every other student in the course, and it will be the student's initial password.
4. For login name, use the student's ASUrite id, which looks like: howdy9.
5. For section, enter their SLN, which looks like: 81203.
6. Leave recitation and e-mail blank (unless you happen to know the student's e-mail address). The student can always add/change their own e-mail address later.
7. Adding a comment is optional. You might want to say Added 10/17 in case you ever wanted to look back at when the student was added.
8. WeBWorK needs to know what to do about existing problem sets for the new student. The default behavior is to simply give the new student(s) the same deadlines as other students have. We recommend starting with this. If a new student needs some of their deadlines adjusted, use the directions on changing a single student's due date after you add the student. WeBWorK offers other ways to handle this problem, but we feel this is the simplest way to deal with it.
9. Click on the button to add the student to the course.

Drop a student

Dropping a student, from where?

• Click Change Class Roster on the professor's page (top middle).
• You do not have to "lock the database" for this.
• From part 2 of this page, pick the student you want to drop, then click on select student.
• Change the enrollment status to drop.
• Change the radio button at the top to Read/Write Mode and click on SAVE CHANGES.

The only aspect of dropping students is that they still appear in places where the system has information for them (e.g., grades on old problem sets). It is a security feature that they are not deleted from the system.

Dropping the student will keep him/her from logging into WeBWorK, and they will not appear for problem sets which are built after the drop.

Change student information

The procedure is the same as for dropping a student, but you can change other data instead (for example, if you misentered a SLN for their section).

Change a student's password

Click on Change Class Roster on the professor's page (top middle). You do not need to lock the database. Part 3 is Give a student a new password..., so select the student you need and change their password.

Building a Problem Set

Building a problem set is the WeBWorK term for making an assignment. You set the open/close/answer dates, and them "build" the set. This creates slots in WeBWorK's database for each student to do the problems in that set. The problems are not available to the students until the open date/time, but you will still be able to look over the problems.

• Click on Build Problem Set on the professor's page (middle right).
• Go to the middle part, "Simple editing of ... set definition files". Pick the one you want and click the button.
• Change the three dates at the top following the same format shown. They have to be sequential in time (first open, then due, then answers become available).
• Click on the Save button. Now the various dates are ready, but you have not activated anything.
• When you want the problem set to appear in the student's list of problem sets, click on Build Problem Set on the professor's page. Use the top part to select the problem set you want, and click on Build Problem Set(s).

You can do this well in advance of the actual open date of a problem set. The only downside to doing it all at once is that if students add/drop your course, you will have to adjust for them. In the case of an add, you will have to build the problem set again. If a student drops, they will still appear in listings of students for each problem set built for them.

Once a problem set has opened, you should not make changes to it unless you really have to. Changing the problem file for an active file could cause the numbers to change on a student's problem.

Download scores for a problem set

Click on Scoring page on the professor's page (left middle). There are basically two steps in downloading scores:

1. Generate a spreadsheet with current scores
2. Download that spreadsheet to your computer

There are a few types of information you can download. The most useful is probably to just download the "totals" file. As each problem set is "scored", a column is added to the totals file for that problem set.

The next most useful information to download is a "scr" file. It has each student's score on each problem for a given problem set.

Note, WeBWorK gives opportunities to edit (or change and upload) these spreadsheet files. This can be useful in a couple of situations

• A student has dropped the course, you have a copy of their existing scores and you are tired of seeing them in the score file. Then download the totals file, delete the line with the student, save as a "csv" file, and upload it back.
• A student's score changed after you scored a problem set and you want a tidy spreadsheet. Then score the problem set again, download the spreadsheet, delete the column you don't like, save as "csv", and upload it again.

View how the class is doing on a given problem set

Go to View students progress in on the professor's page (upper left). Select the problem set you are interested in before you click. You will get a grid showing each student's score on each problem, and the number of incorrect attempts made on each problem. Clicking on the student's name will bring up a copy of the problem set for that particular student.

You can click on View Course/Section Data on the professor's page (left side) after picking the problem set you want. Pick the problem set you want, and it will give you summary data on who has attempted the problem set, and the average scores.

See a student's version of a particular problem

There are three ways to do this from the professor's page:

• To see the whole problem set, follow the first set of instructions in the previous item (click on View students progress in from the upper left part of the professor's page and then click on the student's name). You can try answers in the problem without the score being recorded.
• Pick the student and problem set from the right column, second row of the professors page at Change problem set data for: Clicking on a problem number will bring up just that problem.
• To get paper copies of a problem set, go to Download paper copies on the professor's page (lower right), pick the problem set you want, and go. You can then select the student (or several student's) and download their set in pdf format.

Change a student's score on a particular problem

This changes WeBWorK's internal database of student scores. The change will be visible to the student, but it will not appear in downloaded spreadsheets unless the problem set is "scored" after this change is made.

Go to the right side, second row of the professor's page, Change problem set data for:. You can pick the student and the problem set where you want to make a change.

If you want to give a student some credit on a particular problem, enter the credit in the Status column. It is a percentage right, with legal values ranging from 0 to 1.

Click the toggle at the top to make the page Read/Write as opposed to read only, and click on Save Changes at the top of the page.

Change a everyone's score on a particular problem

Go to upper right part of the professor's page, Change due date for:. Pick the relevant problem set and click. Use the bottom half of the page which follows. For the problem in question, you should enter 1 for both its Status and for Attempted. Do not click on the buttons for either Delete or ReSeed.

Be sure to click on the radio button to make the page read/write, and then click on Save Problem Changes.

Change a due date for a particular student

Follow the same procedure as for changing a score (two items up in this documentation), except instead of changing the score ("status"), you change the due date (and the answer date, etc.) for that student.

Change a due date for everyone

Go to the upper right part of the professor's page, pick your problem set and click on Change due date for:. You can change the due date (and answer date, etc.) for the whole class at the top of the page. Be sure to click on the radio button to make the page read/write, and then click on Save Changes.

Find out what a student entered on a particular problem

Follow either method of getting a live version of a student's problem (View Students Progress in: in the upper left part of the professor's page and click on the student's name, or Change problem set data for: on the right side of the professors page and click on a problem number will bring up just the problem of interest). The last answer the student entered will be visible just as they typed it.

You can see a history of what student(s) have entered by clicking on Housekeeping Page at the lower left of the Professors page, and then go to part 3.

Change the Message of the Day for a course

Click on Housekeeping Page at the lower left of the Professors page. From there, part 1 opens the course message of the day for your section. Edit it, and then click to save.

Bits of advice from other institutions which have used WeBWorK

• Use the initial problem set Introduction to WeBWorK
• Encourage students to print out their problem sets. It helps them
  • work away from a computer
  • work with other students
  • show what they are doing/working on when they come to office hours
• Make student's print out and turn in the initial problem set in order to get credit (so they figure out how to print from the start).
• Encourage students to start early on their homework
• Encourage students to seek help when they run into trouble (hammering the system with the responses doesn't work very well, and they don't learn much from it)
• Encourage students to focus on learning the methods as opposed to just the right answer. WeBWorK grades only final answers but tests will grade the method use.
• If a student is having trouble entering an answer, use the preview button. Students who do this have many fewer frustrations with entering answers.
• For most numerical answers, a student can work it out on their calculator and enter lots of decimal places (to avoid syntax problems)

E-mail and WeBWorK?

Be very careful using the e-mail feature of WeBWorK. The system has the ability to send student's grade information, but that goes against ASU policy on student privacy and grades.

You can send e-mail to one or more students using part 5 of the professor's page. In typing the message, you can insert special codes which will expand to things like the student's name. The most useful are:

• $FN will be replaced by the student's first name
• $LN will be replaced by the student's last name
• $SECTION will be replaced by the SLN of the student's section

We try to initialize the student's e-mail address to a reasonable value (whatever is registered with ASU), and students can always change this once they login. However, some students don't check the e-mail address ASU has for them and they don't bother to change it inside WeBWorK. So, be forewarned that your messages may fall on deaf ears.

Who is logged into WeBWorK now?

Enter part 14 of the professor's page. There is a button to check on who is currently logged into WeBWorK.

What is a PSVN?

The acronym stands for Problem Set Version Number. It encodes information of both which student and which problem set. From this one number WeBWorK can determine which problems to generate and in what version. It is unlikely that you will need to deal with PSVN's directly, but thanks for asking.

What do all of the professor's page things do?

Here is a rundown on the Professor's page, orgainzed as it is.

1. Obtain summary information on how your class is doing on a particular problem set. Information is divided by (sln).
2. A waste of time of us. It is the same as the first item, but divided by recitation sections, a feature we don't use.
3. The best place to see how students are doing on the current problem set. You get each student's score/attempts on each problem. You can also see their version of a particular problem.
4. This is for building problem sets, which makes them visible to students.
5. Send e-mail to students, a feature we don't use. It could be used to send students an e-mail alerting them of their scores, but that would violate ASU's privacy policy since e-mail is considered public.
6. The scoring page, for downloading speadsheets of student scores.
7. Add new students to the course
8. We use this mainly for editing basic data on a student (name, changing password, dropping from course, etc). It can also be used to add a large number of students to your course.
9. Allows you to change data for an individual student, see their problem set.
10. This is a repeat of number 9, but you enter via a code number, the PSVN, instead of by student name and problem set name.
11. Change anything by hand. The only item an instructor should change here are due dates for problem sets.
12. Download a paper copy of a student's version of a problem set.
13. This is for deleting problem sets, which effectively throws away any student grade information on that set. This is used during course development.
14. The main use here is to see who is currently logged in.

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    John Jones
    Last modified: Wed Aug 20 13:32:46 MST 2003

    The work represented here was produced with partial support from a grant by the National Science Foundation (DUE-0125369).