WeBWorK News

Summer of 2013: WeBWorK code camps

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:26:06 GMT

by Michael Gage.

As an open-source project, WeBWorK continues to improve due to the efforts of its numerous contributors. This summer, two code camps are being planned to assist in that effort. Some details on each are listed below.

If you would like to participate in one or more of these, please contact the listed organizer or post a reply here. The WeBWorK grant will cover travel and housing costs and perhaps meals. Do not feel that you have to be a "WeBWorK expert" since there are avenues for plugging in at all levels.

Feel free to post questions or suggestions well.

WeBWorK::Ann Arbor - June 1-3

Host: Gavin LaRose

Some suggested projects:

Documentation
Procedures
Wiki
Model courses
Answer evaluation
Database structure
Mastery learning set type
HTML5 applets
Macros
Something you are interested in working on!

WeBWorK::Vancouver - June 27-30
Host: Djun Kim
Some suggested projects:
Finish the instructor UI -- make it functional and ready for final graphic design
Finalize restful API for the database calls.
Database re-design
Something you are interested in working on!

Important new features from WeBWorK::Raleigh code camp

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 04:26:31 GMT

by Michael Gage.

During March 7-11, 2013, WeBWorK developers from across the US and Canada gathered at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC to work on polishing new WeBWorK features -- some for immediate release and some for later.

Very important new developments include new URLs for obtaining the Open Problem Library and the new versions of the WeBWorK software. And there is much more besides.

WeBWorK::Raleigh code camp results

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 23:41:41 GMT

by Michael Gage.

We're just finishing a very successful weekend of coding at WeBWorK::Raleigh hosted by Alina Duca at the North Carolina State University campus.

There is a preliminary report already from Anneke Bart but we will have more complete reports appearing over the next couple of days in this news bulletin, in the blog aggregators at http://openwebwork.org and http://webwork.maa.org/planet and in the wiki. Stay tuned.

One heads up for WeBWorK software developers: There have been important changes in how the github repositories are organized. An email detailing some of the changes has already been sent out on the webwork-devel list. More information will be following soon on the development list and on the wiki.

-- Mike

Internationalization of WeBWorK -- A Call for Help

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 13:59:31 GMT

by Michael Gage.

First a short news item: Those not in the US have long remarked on the confusion caused by due dates such as: 06/07/2012 for their students. Is that the 7th of June or the 6th of July that the homework is due?

Danny Glin from the University of Calgary (and one of the participants at WeBWorK::Rochester::2012 code camp) has come to the rescue and created the ability to customize the format for dates for your site or for your course.

The customization takes place in the conf/ localOverrides.conf or if you want to customize only one course the course.conf file. The new software is available in the webwork repository at github.com/openwebwork/webwork2-dev.

Thanks, Danny.

This fix is currently part of the 2.5.1 beta version of WeBWorK which will be issued as a stable release some time in late 2012. It is already pretty stable and is being used successfully at many sites this summer. Eventually we'll make it possible to choose common time formats from the course administration page, but we'll take this one step at a time.

And this brings me to the larger issue of this post.

WeBWorK is going international. We already have much of the WeBWorK interface localized so that commands appear in any of several languages such as French, Spanish, Turkish and English. (Localization is software-speak for presenting the user interface in the local language, with the local timezones and the local manner of expressing dates, currencies and so forth.)

The project is far from completed in these languages (if you switch to languages other than English on the course configuration page you will still notice that some of the buttons and links still appear in English) but there has been significant progress. Much of this progress is thanks to the initial work by Ben Walter and his colleagues at the Middle East Technical University in Northern Cyprus. Since then Grant He with some help from me has continued to markup large parts of the current code base

so that the "strings" can be individually translated and presented in any language. Those using old versions of WeBWorK can see the internationalization effect for themselves by using the demo courses at https://hosted2.webwork.rochester.edu/webwork2/maa101, (maa102, etc) and using profa for login and profa for the password.

To finish this task and change the internationalization of WeBWorK from its current proof-of-concept stage to a finished and polished product will take a focused and sustained effort. The initial burst of progress came from massive and enthusiastic effort from a few people, but to make sure that every phrase has been marked for translation and that every translation has been checked for colloquial accuracy will require more organization.

This is what I think will be required: (1) We will need people to volunteer to work to translate phrases from English to their native language. (2) We will need one or two people who are familiar (or willing to become familiar ) with the perl language who will continue to mark up old (and sometimes new code) to make sure that all strings, including commands, buttons, warning strings, directions and so forth are properly marked up so that the strings can be sent to the translators.

(3) Most importantly we'll need an Internationalization Coordinator, one person or two people working together, who will be the central organizers for localization. The Internationalization Coordinator will recruit translators, see that they have up-to-date lists of strings to be translated, (bug them until they get around to translating them) and then place the translated strings into the WeBWorK releases so that new languages or upgraded translations for old languages are available for all users of WeBWorK.

Volunteers interested in helping WeBWorK thrive and grow internationally by serving for a term as the Internationalization Coordinator should contact Mike Gage (gage@math.rochester.edu) or Jason Aubrey (aubreyja@missouri.edu) The Internationalization Coordinator has duties similar in many ways to that of a a journal editor, although probably not as time consuming.

While the central organizing job does not involve a lot of time (it's mostly about making it possible for others to do work) it does need to be done on a steady and sustained basis. For example when new translations come in they need to be promptly placed where they can be downloaded to update active sites. This is both for the sake of WeBWorK students and to encourage the translator to review their work and make corrections by giving them rapid feedback. I've been fulfilling this role to some extent, but while a lot might get done over one short period other WeBWorK issues will distract me, submissions will pile up and the whole translation process slows down. This job needs a person who can take it on as their mission, make it the focus of their attention for a year or so and then pass it on to someone else.

Preliminary instructions for the translator job are at http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Instructions_for_translators. Translating is a task that many people can contribute to in their spare time with the Internationalization Coordinator keeping track of what is

left to be done. The best software I've found so far for this job is the open source Poedit java applet described on the wiki page above.

Marking up the code using the CPAN Localization::Maketext::Simple package is a slightly more technical job that can be done well by undergraduates with some supervision. Preliminary instructions about using the CPAN module can be found linked to http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Localization. Those writing new interface code for WeBWorK should also look at this page and include the "maketext()" markups as they write the new code in order to ease the work load of the code mark up crew.

There is general information on the localization process on the wiki at http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Localization.

Writing or translating homework problems into other languages is a separate project which is closely tied to the new Open Problem Library project. We currently know of collections of problems in French, Spanish and Turkish that we hope to include in the OPL. As the number of problems, and the number of languages increases this project will undoubtedly require its own coordinator. Some have already remarked that it will be interesting to compare calculus homework problems across countries since even calculus problems will probably have cultural differences as well as linguistic ones.

-- Mike

WeBWorK Open Problem Library 3.0

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 02:42:45 GMT

by Michael Gage.

As Djun Kim mentions in his post, the National Problem Library, having grown beyond one language and one country, is now the WeBWorK Open Problem Library (or OPL for short).

Adding problems in new languages, allowing publishers to include their problems in the library and improving the search facilities so that you can find the type of problem you want faster than you can write it yourself are going to required a dedicated effort.

Schemes need to be devised for attaching metadata to the problems (automatically when possible) and software for weeding out near duplicates needs to be developed. In addition we need procedures for new submissions that both makes it easier to submit your favorite problem or your fix of a problem with errors but also allow for a system of checks and balances that guarantees that the submitted problems meet certain standards.

Since we will probably never all agree on what makes a "high quality" problem we also need some kind of rating mechanism that will help instructors find the problems that fit their course and teaching style.

It's a tall order.

Fortunately a few members of the WeBWorK community have volunteered to take the lead in devising OPL 3.0 which will meet all of these criteria. They are Djun Kim at University of British Columbia; John Jones, who was involved in creating the original NPL, at Arizona State University; Dick Lane at University of Montana, George Jennings at California State University at Domincan Hills and Tyler Dzuba, a science librarian at the University of Rochester with experience in metadata and digital library design. Anyone else interested in working on the project should contact one of these leaders.

Some of the early discussion is already taking place on the webwork-devel mailing list

( http://webwork.maa.org/mailman/listinfo/webwork-devel ). As consensus emerges summaries will be posted on the wiki in the section for developers for further comments. (A search of OPL should bring up most of the relevant information.)

Thanks very much Djun, John, Dick, George and Tyler for taking the lead in this important project.

Improving the usefulness of the OPL is one of the most requested features that has come up in our surveys of WeBWorK users.

The library group is just the first team arising from our intent to bring focus to the various active projects being developed within the WeBWorK community:

My next post will concern our attempt to bring focus

to the "internationalization" or as it's called in software speak "localization" effort for WeBWorK. This involves making the WeBWorK application itself work in a many languages in a convenient and sustainable way and the solicitation of WeBWorK problems written in many languages.

-- Mike

WeBWorK Job Opening @ MAA

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 15:41:35 GMT

by Jason Aubrey.

The MAA is seeking a part-time system administrator for their WeBWorK servers. The position description is attached to this post.

Note that the successful candidate may work remotely; so there would be no need to relocate to Washington, D.C.

It is hoped that the position might appeal to members of the WeBWorK community with relevant experience, or other linux or unix system administrators who have the time, interest, and experience to take on this position.

Please send inquiries and resumes to John Wyatt, Chief Operating Officer for the MAA at jwyatt at maa dot org. The position will remain open until it is filled.

Summary for WeBWorK::Rochester::2012 code camp

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 18:00:02 GMT

by Michael Gage.

Summary for WeBWorK::Rochester::2012

The WeBWorK::Rochester code camp, focused on user interface improvements, was held at Rochester from June 6th through June 9th, 2012. It was a great success. This was the first working gathering of WeBWorK developers since our summer 2007 meeting at AIM (American Institute of Mathematics); we hope it will kick start a spate of development over the summer on the look and feel of WeBWorK. In conjunction with PREP courses last summer and two additional code camps this summer, we hope to flatten the learning curve significantly for new users of WeBWorK and to improve the overall usability of the system.

We have a lot to report, including significant progress in WeBWorK interface design, new and developing infrastructure procedures for supporting WeBWorK users and developers, discussion about the social structure of the openWeBWorK development community, and a report on our collaboration with the Teaching Open Source organization through their POSSE workshop at RIT.

Oh yes -- and since WeBWorK now has contributions in more than one language and from several countries -- we changed the name of the National Problem Library to the WeBWorK Open Problem Library (WOPL) or Open Problem Library for short. More on that later -- it was quite a discussion!

If you are really impatient, you can stop reading and go explore the new stuff, bugs and all, at https://hosted2.webwork.rochester.edu/webwork2/maa101 (or maa102, etc). Sign in as profa and use profa as the password. Use your iPad!!!! -- it’s not pretty yet but it works!!!

Below we’ll first describe the daily progression of the code camp for those who weren’t there, and especially for those who haven’t participated in previous code camps. They are intense experiences. A lot can get done; it’s hard work, but it’s also fun and satisfying.

We’d like to encourage others to plan and hold local code camps to work on aspects of WeBWorK that they would like to develop. No permission is needed from any central WeBWorK authorities, but those of us who have been doing this for a while will be glad to help out in any way we can. Let us know.

At the end of this note we’ll list specific accomplishments (deliverables ) for the week.

As a last item before describing our meeting, here is the list of WeBWorK events scheduled to take place this summer and fall. We hope to see you at one or more of them. Keep track of the events section in the wiki (http://webwork.maa.org/wiki) for new additions.

WeBWorK::Clinton - June 20-22, 2012 (John Travis)
WeBWorK Consultants Workshop - August 1, 2012 (Arnie Pizer)
Mathfest Exhibit Presentations - August 2-4, 2012 (John Travis and Jason Aubrey)
WeBWorK::Winona - August 5-8, 2012 (Jason Aubrey and John Travis)
MAA JMM Mini Course - January 8-10, 2013 (Joint Math Meeting in San Diego ) (Jason Aubrey and John Travis)

For this code camp we had participants from all across the continent: Jason Aubrey from the University of Missouri, Karen Clark from the College of New Jersey (TCNJ), David Gage, a grad student at the University of Waterloo, Danny Glin from the University of Calgary, Djun Kim from the University of British Columbia, Peter Staab from Fitchsburg State College, and John Travis from Mississippi College.

The local participants were Mark Herman from the University of Rochester, Christina Kayastha, a junior at the UofR, and Paul Seeburger from Monroe Community College. We also coordinated with the POSSE workshop at nearby RIT, enlisted the aid of the science librarians Diane Cass, Tyler Dzuba and Zahra Kamarei, and received help with distributed software development from Prof. Chen Ding of the the CS department.

Vicki Roth, Arnie Pizer, and Mike Gage hosted the event with the support of Louise Wingrove from the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (to whom we owe undying gratitude!). The daily coding took place on the 11th floor of the Hylan Mathematics Building at the University of Rochester with a view of the Finger Lakes region, while the nearby Staybridge Inn on the banks of the Genessee River housed our out-of-town visitors and provided a delightful place for discussion in the evenings. Even the Rochester weather cooperated -- mostly sun, little rain -- wow, really amazing!

What we planned:
We set several goals while planning this meeting. We wanted to tackle a long list of requests for updating the instructor interfaces to Web 2.0 standards, incorporating javaScript and CSS (AJAX) to give WeBWorK a desktop look and feel. Since our developers are now widely dispersed geographically, we also wanted to develop a distributed cooperative programming workflow using old tools such as IRC and newer ones such as github. We wanted to encourage more participation in WeBWorK organization, so that long time users could become software developers. We wanted also to attract new contributors, perhaps some from outside academia, who have participated in other open source projects.

We accomplished all of this. On the first day (Wednesday), we had all of the participants up and running on the IRC (a venerable version of the chat room used by most open source software developers). In the afternoon, we worked with the group known as POSSE (Professors Open Source Experience) organized by Steve Jacobs at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Their program was serendipitously scheduled for the same week as ours. They used WeBWorK as a guinea pig in exploring collaborative programming. Jason Aubrey and Mike Gage attended the first two days (Monday and Tuesday) of the POSSE program while they were talking about the social aspects of collaborative software development and the differences and similarities among different open source software communities. Later on that week, we communicated with them over IRC even though they were meeting a scant three miles away at RIT.

The POSSE workshop and the TeachingOpenSource organizations may be of interest to others in the WeBWorK community. Their mission is to encourage academic instructors in computer science, communication, journalism and other areas to use bite-sized development chunks of open source software as projects for their students. You can read more details about their organization at POSSE and at TeachingOpenSource.

On Thursday, Prof. Chen Ding from the University of Rochester CS department gave a short presentation on using git or mercurial for collaborative development. David Gage from the University of Waterloo then told us about his use of Backbone.js, Twitter’s Bootstrap library and other modern software tools, while developing LibraryBrowser3. Most of the rest of the week was spent working in small teams with occasional breaks for food and group discussion. Thursday evening, we met at the Dinosaur Grill to meet face to face with the POSSE participants and to discuss our experience.

By Friday morning, Peter Staab, Danny Glin, Mark Herman, Paul Seeburger, and Djun Kim had come up with a design for a new classlist editor (perhaps to be renamed StudentManagement?), and Peter Staab had found a drop-in javaScript component for presenting an editable grid. By Friday afternoon Peter and David Gage had developed a workable proof of concept, and by Saturday they had a completed prototype which you can view at the “hosted2” link above. The actions that can be performed on each student record have not yet been connected to the backend server, but you can already get a good idea of the final look and feel. Once the class list editor is polished, we’ll do something similar with the homework set editor, perhaps at a future code camp.

On Friday afternoon, at the end of a long day of coding, we met with Dianne Cass, Zara Kamarei, and Tyler Dzuba from the UR science libraries to discuss the library question tagging issue and meta-data in general. There are no easy solutions, of course, but they are interested in studying our project and plan to come back with some suggestions. We’ll look into this issue in more detail at WeBWorK::Winona.
HyDrA

On Saturday we had a surprisingly long discussion on choosing a new name for the NPL, something which we all agreed was needed since the internationalization of the WeBWorK interface renders “National” inappropriate.   While “Hydra” was an early contender, it tired early, despite the opportunities this name would present for a great logo (see above). The final choices were between “Open Problem Library,” “openWeBWorK Problem Library,” and “WeBWorK Open Problem Library”. After much discussion and several straw polls, we decided on “WeBWorK Open Problem Library” or WOPL, which might become OpenProblemLibrary informally and whenever the WeBWorK context is clear. One of the convincing points for this choice was that “open” could be replaced by “MAA” or “WHFreeman” or “physics” to describe companion libraries which might or might not be open to everyone.

There was a little discussion about the capitalization of WeBWorK and, again surprisingly, the current version won out overwhelming. Initially most people were rather undecided or ready to change the orthography until David and Christina pointed out that, at least to open source developers (who we are trying to recruit) and to all younger WeBWorK users, WebWork is boring camel case and webwork is worse, while WeBWorK is unique, grabs the attention and starts conversations. Fortunately search engines ignore capitalization, so in a search for webwork or WebWork our name comes up uniquely and distinctively as the one with the weird capitalization. And if some people don’t always capitalize it right in casual writing, it’s not a big deal. Many people insist on pronouncing our name webworks in any case. (And then there is the case of laplace and gauss whose namesakes don’t get capitalized consistently either. )

On another note, Vicki completed a review of recent publications about WeBWorK; a number of new research articles, dissertations, and masters theses have emerged in the last couple of years. Especially interesting was the discovery of three well-written theses about WeBWorK completed by undergraduates at Worchester Polytechnic Institute.

This code camp has been a great experience. We hope that the next code camp which Aaron Wangberg is hosting and Jason Aubrey and John Travis are organizing, will be equally rewarding. It will focus more on the content side of WeBWorK, including Aaron’s project of adaptive homework assignments, upgrades to the PGcore/PGbasic infra structure, and the creation of template courses which new WeBWorK users can modify for their own use or use as they are.

Best regards,
Mike Gage, Arnie Pizer and Vicki Roth.

WeBWorK::Rochester accomplishments
Development Infrastructure
Installed doxygen on webwork.maa.org for presenting POD documentation -- Djun Kim and Jason Aubrey
Set up workflow for collaborative software development using github.
The development repositories are webwork2-dev and pg-dev on github.com/openwebwork
The release repositories are webwork2 and pg on github.com/openwebwork
Discussed instituting a road map and a series of milestones
Learned to use bugzilla effectively.
Learned to use IRC.
Signed up for the webwork-devel mailing list.
Created a planet aggregator for WeBWorK related blogs -- Jason Aubrey and Mike Gage : email them to request to have your blog included. (http://webwork.maa.org/planet)

WeBWorK code
Created a new alpha version of the Student Management page (formerly Classlist editor) -- (user interface exists as classlist3 but not yet active) -- Danny Glin, Peter Staab, David Gage, Mark Herman, Paul Seeburger, Djun Kim
LibraryBrowser 3: (David Gage) has an alpha demo and we reported bugs and UI issues and new features (all)
Added key bar so that WeBWorK can be used on the iPad -- David Gage, Christina Kayastha
Cleaned up HTML generation and validating HTML content of webwork problems -- Christina Kayastha and Djun Kim
Updated config files:   site.conf, defaults.config, localOverrides.conf are now used --Danny Glin -- great work!! This will make it relatively painless to upgrade WeBWorK since all of the local changes are in sites.conf and localOverrides.conf and the new updated defaults for new features are in defaults.conf
need to write up instructions for updating to webwork2-dev, pg-dev
Created really awesome installation script -- (on github.com/aubreyja/ for now) Jason Aubrey and Arnie Pizer
Bug link in the problem editor now links more directly from WeBWorK to the appropriate section of Bugzilla -- Jason Aubrey
Incorporated Geoff Goehle's MathAchievements (WeBWorKAchievements ?) package into the main code. We’re still thinking about the name. It was pointed out that MathAchievements might be too narrow if we start serving other disciplines. -- Mike Gage (and Geoff Goehle)
Registration on the admin page now brings up the form on the MAA site rather than sending an email message. This project could still use work to allow parts of the form to be filled in automatically.
Incorporated Bill Wheelers connections with LTI.
WeBWorK Open Problem Library structures
We discussed metadata for the WOPL with Tyler Dzuba, Zari Kamarei, and Diane Cass (librarians at U. of Rochester)
Renamed the library to WeBWorK Open Problem Library (WOPL or OPL for short )
WOPL moved from the SVN repository to github/openwebwork.
Prototype XML format for metadata for PG problems -- Djun Kim -- github.com/djun-kim
Worked on developing new PG problems -- using javaScript -- Christina Kayastha and John Travis
Social infrastructure
Discussed setting up project management structure.
Work on organizing WeBWorK::Clinton, WeBWorK::Winona, and the MathFest WeBWorK Consultants workshop. -- John Travis and Arnie Pizer
Documentation for instructors and academics
New documents:    Introduction to WeBWorK -- openwebwork/docs -- Karen Clark
the plan is to break this into helpPages for real time access
New documents: Academic references are being stored in the reference database linked to the wiki. We plan to use RSS feeds to update other pages displaying the references (e.g the the Publications splash page). -- Vick Roth, Jason Aubrey and Mike Gage
Two of four CIRTL lessons for future faculty members created-- Vicki Roth and Karen Clark

Openings available in WeBWorK Consultant Training Session at Mathfest in August 2012

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:22:37 GMT

by Arnold Pizer.

Online homework and WeBWorK in particular has proven to be an effective tool in helping students learn Calculus and Precalculus mathematics. Many instructors are interested in trying WeBWorK but would like some help in getting started.

For the WeBWorK Consultant Training Sessions, we are recruiting public-spirited instructors who have experience with WeBWorK and who would be interested in helping other mathematics instructors get started with the WeBWorK online homework system.

There are a few openings left in the WeBWorK Consultant Training Sessions that will be held on Wednesday, August 1, 2021 in Madison, WI the day before Mathfest. The one-day session will provide participants with the knowledge and resources necessary to conduct regional WeBWorK Outreach Workshops and/or to make further contributions to the WeBWorK opensource project.

For further information and/or to apply for one of the openings, goto http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/WeBWorK_Consultant_Training_Sessions

webservices web-confernce Thurs 2/16 3pm EST

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:03:29 GMT

by Jason Aubrey.

Hi all,

Please join us for another code review web-conference this Thursday 2/16 at 3pm EST. This time, we'll be talking about the various web services provided by webwork.

Here's the link to join in.

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=voffice&password=M.4FADCAF50B9B077977ED9FC235C04B

We recommend you use a usb headset or some manner of electro-acoustic transducer that can be worn on or near your ear to help transmit audio from your computer to your brain and not to be picked up by the microphone on your computer. Otherwise, your audio may feed back into your microphone and cause The Echo, a phenomenon from which no coherent statement can recover.

Hope you can join us!

Jason

In-Class Formative Assessment with WeBWorK: RUME Working Group (Feb. 23rd, RUME Conference, Portland, OR.)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:37:46 GMT

by Aaron Wangberg.

We invite you to attend our Working Group: Research on Using Technology as a Research and Formative Assessment Tool in the Calculus Classroom at the annual RUME Conference in February.

This research group brings together researchers interested in using technology to investigate how students develop their understanding of calculus concepts. We will share the possibilities of utilizing whiteboard and data analysis enhancements to WeBWorK, and discuss developing ideas for improving them as (A) research tools, (B) instructional tools, and (C) formative assessment tools within calculus courses. We are also very open to discussions about how this technology may be extended beyond calculus.

The abstract and agenda is attached.

Please complete this survey to allow us to tailor the sessions to the wants and needs of the group. You're welcome to join us for as much or little as you like.

We look forward to seeing you in Portland!

Organizers:

Nicole Engelke, California State University, Fullerton (nengelke@fullerton.edu);

Gulden Karakok, University of Northern Colorado (gulden.karakok@unco.edu);

Aaron Wangberg, Winona State University (awangberg@winona.edu)