# Planet WeBWorK

## November 29, 2018

### Michael Gage

#### Embedding single WeBWorK problems in HTML pages

Whether writing a full text book or just an explanation and worksheet for a class it is often useful to include an active (even better an interactive example) within the text itself. You can always use a link to refer to a WeBWorK homework set but that doesn’t have the immediacy of a problem embedded in the page itself.

Now you can use WeBWorK to do that -- there is a new mechanism that allows you to export the content of an individual problem without all of the buttons and navigation items that usually appear for a standard homework set. Here is an example.

Problem 1 -- interval notation

In many websites this problem is interactive, try it.   After the jump I have attached a link to an HTML page with many more examples which you can try out. You can also download the page and modify it to display other questions.  On the HTML page I have wrapped each example with a "knowl" slide down javaScript that allows you to slide open or to close each example question individually.

## June 13, 2017

### Michael Gage

#### Installing the WeBWorK opaque server and the Moodle opaque client

Installing the WeBWorK opaque server and the Moodle opaque client

Introduction

The Opaque question type and the Moodle Opaque client were created by Tim Hunt to allow webservices to power questions used in the Moodle quizzes. They were specifically designed to work with the OpenMark question engine at the Open University in England with the expectation that they could interoperate with other question engines as well.
The WeBWorK Opaque server described in this document accepts requests from the Moodle Opaque client and returns a rendered PG question.
The combination of the Moodle Opaque client and the WeBWorK Opaque server allows any WeBWorK question to be included in a Moodle quiz giving Moodle quizzes access to the entire range of mathematics questions commonly used in WeBWorK homework installations, in particular all of the questions in the OpenProblemLibrary. The WeBWorK/Opaque question type behaves much like STACK questions (created by Chris Sangwin) and supplements the mathematics questions available from STACK (System for Teaching and Assessment using a Computer Algebra Kernel).
This is a first attempt to interface WeBWorK (or to my knowledge any question engine besides OpenMark) with the Opaque client. Suggestions for improvements particularly from experienced Moodle users familiar with question “behaviours” and how to configure them to best advantage are welcome.
The main steps are as follows:
1. Install the opaque question type client in Moodle
2. Configure the Moodle question engine (and test)
3. Create a Moodle quiz with opaque questions (and test)

The steps above do not require you to set up your own opaque server. You can use the publically available opaque servers listed to test that the Opaque client and Moodle quiz have been set up correctly.
If you already have a WeBWorK installation then adding the WeBWorK Opaque server is straight forward. “Install the WeBWorK Opaque Server”.
To see the tools available for duplicating an existing WeBWorK course asa course using Moodle quizzes read the section “How to transfer a WeBWorK course with homework sets to a Moodle course with quizzes”.

## August 08, 2016

### Geoff Goehle

#### CodeMirror and PG

Do you edit PG problems using the WeBWorK interface? Do you have trouble finding missing semi-colons because the error line numbers are wrong? Do you grind your teeth every time you try to tab in the editor and you lose focus on the text box? Then this post is for you!

The classic editing environment in all of the WeBWorK PG editors is nothing more than a HTML <textarea>. This leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn't have line numbers, it doesn't have any code coloring, and if you tab you leave the textarea. In an upcoming update we will replace the textarea editor with a CodeMirror based one. CodeMirror is a Javascript based editor that supports coloring, line numbers, regex based search and replace, and many other features. Rather than just posting a screen shot, I've included a functional version of the editor below.

Lets go through some of the new features. Feel free to experiment and explore with the demo above as you follow along.

Coloring

First, notice that the editor supports code coloring. Most of the code coloring is perl based, however there are a couple of twists. You may notice that both the BEGIN_TEXT/END_TEXT block and the BEGIN_PGML_SOLUTION/END_PGML_SOLUTIION blocks are colored. There have been PG specific upgrades to the coloring code which highlight variables, latex, ascii math, as well as command subsitution in both the classical EV3 blocks as well as newer PGML blocks. The PGML coloring in particular is fancy since it correctly colors nested blocks.

Line Numbers

One nice addition is line numbers. However, another behind the scenes upgrade is a fix to a long standing bug which caused the line number errors in PG error messages to not match the line numbers in the original code. So now if you miss a semicolin somewhere in your code, the perl error line number should be closer to the actual error.

Search and Replace

Changing over to a Javascript editor means that the browser based find function no longer interacts with the editor. Luckily the Codemirror editor has its own search and replace functionality which is even more powerful than the browser search. For example, use Ctl-F and search for Text. You should see the words heighlighted as well as indications on the scroll bar. Next do a search replace with Shift-Ctl-F and search using the Regular Expression /$([^]+)$/ and replace with [$1]. This will replace all regular PGML Latex with display style PGML Latex. These sorts of Regular Expression manipulations can be really powerful once you get used to them. You can read more here if you haven't seen them before. Trailing Spaces In PGML spaces matter. You leave two trailing spaces on a line to create a newline and you leave three to have a new paragraph. Since you can't usually "see" trailing spaces when in a PGML block the editor will highlight trailing whitespace with a red line. Tabbing and Brackets A couple of other common code editor features that are included are bracket matching and tabbing. When you type or move past brackets the matching bracket will be highlighted. When you press tab a soft tab consisting of four spaces will be generated. Finally when you are on a tabbed line and create a new line it will automatically start with the same indentation as the previous one. There are other features that could be added, if there ends up being enough interest. The most interesting, but also the most complicated, would be a autocompletion. The main issue with this feature is it would have to be aware of what macros were loaded, and if the macros ever changed then the code completion might be wrong. Another potential edition would be true smart tabbing which would try to parse the code and only insert tabs when appropriate. #### LiveGraphics and Javascript Its been a while since I've posted, but that does not mean nothing is happening. The just-in-type homework system is now in the pipeline to be merged into develop and should be available in the regular release in Fall 2015. I've also been spending time rebuilding WeBWorK's default 3d grapher using javascript, webgl, and canvas. This will eliminate the need for the current java applet and is much more portable. Read more about it after the jump. The best WeBWorK problems are those which have a feature or capability that would be impossible using traditional pen and paper homework. Some of my favorites are the multivariable calculus WeBWorK problems which include an interactive 3d graph. Students generally have a hard time visualizing 3d objects and including a manipulable 3d view of a surface is something that would be impossible without web based homework. WeBWorK has a number of this type of problem and they were all written using a java applet called LiveJar. This applet takes raw Mathematica code describing a graphical object, either generated by the problem pg code or included via a file, and renders a graph similar to what you would find in Mathematica. Unfortunately java applets are increasingly difficult to get running and too many of my students ended up with problems which looked like: Even using a properly signed applet wasn't good enough and after several student complaints I had to remove problems with manipulable 3d graphs from my multivariable calculus class last semester. In an effort to save those problems I've put together a javascript program based on the webgl wrapper x3dom which mostly replicates the original LiveJar applet. The system is has only just been completed, and has some rough edges. However it does a passable job of plotting surfaces. Instead of the previous image students will see the following, which is much better: They can click on the graph and drag it to rotate, or use the mouse wheel to zoom. Since javascript is so portable, I can even include an example of a manipulable graph in this blog. Use the controls mentioned previously or those listed here to try it out. (Note: If you are using https you will probably need to "allow insecure content" to see the graph.) For those of you who are interested, x3dom is a webgl interpreter that uses a regular html structure to define and manipulate the graphics objects in a canvas region. For example, to render a blue sphere you just include the following html in a <x3d> html element: <Shape render="true"> <Appearance> <Material diffuseColor="0 0 1" shininess="0.2"/> </Appearance> <Sphere solid="true" radius="1"/> </Shape> Then the x3dom javascript does the rest using canvas, html5 and webgl. (For those devices not webgl compatible it has a flash based fallback.) The javascript replacement for LiveJar basically just parses the provided mathematica code and generates the correct x3dom html using jquery. Some things to keep in mind about this js replacement. • It is specifically a replacement for LiveJar and built to correctly render the ~50 problems in the OPL which use it. New problems could certainly be made with this script, but there are other more fully featured javascript 3d graphers out there which allow you to skip the Mathematica entirely. • There is a hidden configuration option in defaults.config which can be used to turn the java applet back on. • These graphs will render in most phones and tablets, and can even be manipulated using a touch screen, but the performance can vary. ## July 28, 2016 ### Geoff Goehle #### WeBWorK LTI - Authentication Do you use Blackboard (or Moodle or Canvas etc...) and wish that you could have Blackboard automatically create student WeBWorK accounts, let students go from Moodle to WeBWorK without having to log in, and have students' WeBWorK grade automatically transferred back to your Canvas gradebook? Well then the newly revamped WeBWorK LTI interface is right up your ally. In this post I'll talk about how to set up the LTI interface to allow students to log in to WeBWorK via Blackboard (or Moodle or Canvas, etc...) as well as automatic account creation. In the next post I'll talk about how to set up the grade passback feature. (This is a preview of a feature that will be available in WeBWorK 2.12.) Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard, Moodle and Canvas all support a protocol called Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) which can be used to connect learning tools like WeBWorK to the LMS in a standardized fashion. Unfortunately the LTI scene is somewhat turbulent. The most common version, 1.2, is widespread but has limited functionality. In particular learning tools can only pass a single grade back to the LMS in version 1.2. This is problematic for something like WeBWorK which has many grades ranging from problem grades to set grades to course grades. Unfortunately the more fully featured LTI version 2.0, which does allow you to transfer full gradebooks, has not seen widespread adoption and instead some LMS are implementing their own custom solutions. For example, there is already a great deal of integration between WeBWorK and Moodle (see here for example) that doesn't make use of LTI. Unfortunately, instructors and departments often don't get to choose which LMS they use. So we have upgraded WeBWorK's existing LTI module to make the most out of the more limited version 1.2 functionality. The result is not perfect, but it does work with a wide set of LMS including Blackboard, Canvas and Moodle. In this post I will talk about how to set up the LTI authentication interface. I will talk about how to enable and use the grade passback feature in the next post. ### First Time Setup - WeBWorK Before you can use WeBWorK's LTI features you need to do some initial setup. This will need to be done by a system administrator and in particular often requires administrator access to both WeBWorK and your Learning Management System. All of the configuration for WeBWorK is done in the authen_LTI.conf file. First you should copy authen_LTI.conf.dist to authen_LTI.conf. Then you need to uncomment the line #include("conf/authen_LTI.conf"); in localOverrides.conf. Now there are some things you will need to do in authen_LTI.conf. The only thing you must set is the LTI Consumer Secret. This acts like a global password and is used to authenticate all communication between WeBWorK and the LMS. So pick something reasonably complicated.$LTIBasicConsumerSecret = ""; #This must be set
There are some other options that can be set as well.  I'll go through them in order of most things you will most likely need to think about to less likely.

$NonceLifeTime - When the LMS sends a user to WeBWorK it makes a request identified by a "Nonce". This variable controls how long the Nonce is valid from the time it is created by the LMS. It should be short enough to prevent "casual" man-in-the-middle attacks. However, you may need to set it to something longer if your servers/network are slow or if the clocks on your servers are not synced.$preferred_source_of_username - When a user logs into WeBWorK from the LMS WeBWorK needs to determine the username of the person logging in.  The default is to use the email address of the student logging in as their user name.  This is because many/most LMS do not actually provide a traditional username (also called a "sourcedid").  This variable controls if the email or the sourcedid is used as the username for the student in WeBWorK.  If your LMS doesn't provide a sourcedid but you don't want to use the entire email address you can also set $strip_address_from_email and WeBWorK will strip off the server portion of the email address when creating the username.$debug_lti_parameters - Getting things set up for the first time can be tricky and the error messages are kept vague by default (for security).  Set this flag to have WeBWorK split out a lot more information about the LTI authentication process.  This can be a big help with troubleshooting.

$LMSManageUserData - WeBWorK will try to keep your student's data up to date with the LMS if this flag is on. Student data doesn't change much so you could turn it off with relatively few side effects. You can also set custom "local functions" in authen_LTI.conf which customize users before they are created (and sets before they are assigned to users). If you do that then you should definitely turn this variable off.$LTIAccountCreationCutoff - For security reasons users with permission levels of ta or higher are not automatically created.  In other words you will need to manually add professor users to a course before they can log in via the LMS.  If you want to allow professors to be created automatically set this variable to 'professor'.

%LMSrolesToWeBWorKroles - If your LMS uses roles not listed in this hash you will need to add those roles so that users get the right WeBWorK permission level.

There are some more variables that can be set which relate to the automatic grading features, but I'll talk about those in the next post.

#### First Time Setup - LMS

Next you need to set up your LMS.  In general you will need to provide the LMS  the following things:
1. The address of your WeBWorK server.  This has to be the address of the server as specified in site.conf, e.g. the combination of $server_root_url and$webwork_url
2. The "Tool Provider Key" or "Consumer Key"; this is just some made up word, like "webwork".
3. The "Tool Provider Secret" or "Consumer Secret"; this is the password used to identify the LMS to your WeBWorK site (and vice versa) and should be the same as  $LTIBasicConsumerSecret 4. What kind of user information is provided to WeBWorK. The specifics in setting up the LMS vary depending on what LMS you use. I've posted links to setup instructions for Blackboard, Moodle and Canvas below. Note, when the instructions refer to the "LTI" or "Tool", that is WeBWorK. • Blackboard: The basic instructions are here. • In the Administrator Panel (under Building Blocks) click LTI Tool Providers and then Register Provider Domain • Input the address of the WeBWorK server in Provider Domain • Use Set Globally for Default configuration and input the Tool Provider Key (any word, e.g. webwork) and the Tool Provider Secret (e.g.$LTIBasicConsumerSecret)
• Enable Send User Data. (Restricting to ssl is safer if you have https enabled.) Then enable all three user fields.
• Moodle:  The basic instructions are here
• Go to Site administration > Plugins > Activity modules > LTI > Manage external tool types and click "Add External Tool Configuration"
• Input the Tool Name and the WeBWorK server address as the Tool Base URL
• Input the Consumer Key (any word e.g. webwork) and the Shared Secret (e.g. $LTIBasicConsumerSecret). • In Privacy set both "Share" configurations to "Always". If you have https available its safer to also enable "Force SSL". • Canvas: The basic instructions are here • Go to Settings > Apps > View App Configurations > Add App • Choose "Manual Entry" for configuration type. • The "Launch URL" is the url of the course and can be left blank. The "Domain" is just the server address • Input the Consumer Key (any word e.g. webwork) and the Shared Secret (e.g.$LTIBasicConsumerSecret).
• You should set "Privacy" to "Public".
A couple of other things to think about:
• Its usually best to have WeBWorK open in a new window.  There are usually settings you can set which will control this.  However feel free to experiment with other settings until you find a mode you like.
• If you want to get fancy you can also try to have the LMS provide section or recitation information by setting a custom parameter.  In all of the configurations there is a "Custom Fields" section.  You would specify "section = #" or "recitation = #" to set the section or recitation.

Once you have set up your WeBWorK configuration files and added WeBWorK as an LTI Tool to your LMS you will need to make a link/assignment in the LMS that students can use to get to WeBWorK.  Again, the process for this varies depending on what LMS you are using.  I'll describe the process for Moodle, Blackboard and Canvas.
• Blackboard:  Some basic instructions are here
• Go to Conent > Build Content > (Create) Web Link
• Add a Name for your link and the URL of the course you are linking to.  You can get the url using "copy link location" on the link to the course in the main WeBWorK page.  Alternatively the url structure is:
http://webwork.server.edu/webwork2/CourseName
• Check "This link is a Tool Provider"
• Moodle: Some basic instructions are here
• Go to a Course, Turn "Editing" on, and click "Add an activity or resource".
• Choose "External Tool" and click "Add".
• Pick an activity name and add the URL of the course you are linking to.  You can get the url using "copy link location" on the link to the course in the main WeBWorK page.  Alternatively the url structure is:
http://webwork.server.edu/webwork2/CourseName
• Canvas:  Some basic instructions are here
• Select "External Tool" for Submission type.
• Input the URL of the course you are linking to.  You can get the url using "copy link location" on the link to the course in the main WeBWorK page.  Alternatively the url structure is:
http://webwork.server.edu/webwork2/CourseName

#### Logging In and Creating Students

Now you should be all set up.  You can test it out by creating a test student in your LMS and using the link to log into the LMS from WeBWorK.  The log into WeBWorK should not require a password, the WeBWorK user for the student should be automatically created, and the user should also automatically be assigned all "visible" homework sets.
(The warnings in the above image are the output created by the $debug_lti_parameters flag.) When a user logs into WeBWorK for the first time a WeBWorK user is automatically created for them. This can save a lot of work in setting up your WeBWorK class. There are a few features/quirks of this process that should be mentioned. • Students created via the LMS will not have neither a student id nor an initial password. In particular they will not be able to log into WeBWorK directly. The$external_authentication flag is set to one by default and actually prevents them from seeing the WeBWorK login page.  They will need to log in via the LMS unless you get fancy.
• Accounts with a permission level of TA or higher are not automatically created by default for security reasons.  So you will have to add your TA's and other professors manually.
• Students created via the LMS are assigned all visible sets.  However, the due dates of these sets are not adjusted to take late registrations into account unless you get fancy.
• You can define the local routines which can be used to modify newly created users and newly assigned sets.  For example, you can give newly created users a random student_id/password or you can alter the due dates of a student depending on how late they register.

## May 17, 2016

### Geoff Goehle

#### Release 2.12

Hello everyone. I'm happy to announce the release of WeBWorK version 2.12. This version marks a shift to a new release schedule. Starting now we will put out new versions of WeBWorK in May and in August. In particular we won't be doing a December release since its too difficult test and release a new version in time for people to upgrade their servers over the winter break. The big feature for this release is a completely revamped LTI interface that supports grade passback. Now you can have WeBWorK grades automatically sent back to your LMS of choice (e.g. Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas). Disclaimer: Some administrative access required. Checkout the release notes and upgrade instructions after the jump or a slightly more technical version on the WeBWorK wiki at webwork.maa.org/wiki/Release_notes_for_WeBWorK_2.12

## Major Changes

### Hardcopy Themes

This adds support for different hardcopy themes. Instructors will set the theme that students have access to on the Course Configuration page, and can also select the different themes on the instructor download handouts page. Right now there are two themes: the traditional two column WeBWorK theme and a new "one column" theme which the full page width. The system is also set up so that universities can add their own themes for tests or with branding. Note: You will need to make sure the fullpage latex package is available on your server to use this feature.

This is a rewrite of the existing Past Answer's page. First, it replaces the old "wildcard/regex" feature in Past Answers with multiselect lists. Now instructors will explicitly select which sets, users and problems they would like to search for past answers. It also adds the ability to download answers from the Past Answer page as a CSV.

### OPL Statistics

This adds problem usage statistics to the Library Browser. When enabled and configured you should see both local and 'global' statistics on how many times problems have been assigned, students average scores and, average attempt numbers. Here local statistics are generated from the data on your WeBWorK server and reflects how your courses use problems. Global statistics are generated from over a dozen different universities and includes information on 23000 problems. You can donate data from your school by running update-OPL-statistics and then upload-OPL-statistics.

### Periodic Randomization

This feature allows you to force problems to generate a new seed after a fixed number of attempts. It is sort of "max attempts lite" in that students can keep trying, but they have to start over. The feature is enabled via the Course Configuration page (in the Optional Modules section). Instructors can set the default number of attempts before re-randomization. The number of attempts before re-randomization can also be set on a per problem basis.

## Minor Changes

• Updated the orientation and demo sets to more accurately reflect how things currently work.
• Refactored the attempts table code out into its own module.
• Refactored the show me another feature out into its own module.
• Changed how options are grouped on the config page. Now there is a "Optional Modules" tab which has all of the different module options in one place.
• When generating individual set scores from the Scoring Tools page just-in-time sets now provide information about sub problems as well as top level problems
• Fixed a bug where apache child processes had the same random seed.
• Polished two existing features to make them more obvious. The first is the ability to display extra grade information to students on the Grades page by using email merge and the second is to restrict which students instructors can see to a particular section or group sections.
• Started making changes about how reduced scoring dates are reported to make it clearer that the reduced scoring date occurs before the due/close date.
• Fixed a bug where students may be unable to open a problem they previously attempted.
• Added localization files for Russian
• Added video macros to pg so that you can use the video command to deliver video hints via html5
• Fixed bugs with correct answers
• Changed the ? popups to click instead of hover since the hover detection was spotty
• Added better "more like this" messages to the library browser
• Refactored all of the server rendering scripts to one big script sendXMLRPC.pl. In particular this enables automated sanity checking of the OPL
• Fixed a bug with gateways with multiple pages and checkboxes
• Fixed a bug where the reduced credit date wasn't set on newly created sets
• Polished the hide scores feature on Gateways. Now if hide scores is selected scores aren't shown in grades and you cannot check answers or see correct answers.
• Changed the default text in the welcome message for a course and made it so that students do not see the info box if the welcome message is the default text.
• Fixed a bug where on very new installations the Library Browser would fail with MySQL errors
• Added ability to reorder problems on tables using the Problem Set Detail 2 using touch-punch
• Made scaffold problems more accessible by allowing the closed tab headings to be navigated to and opened using the keyboard.
• Added a parserWordCompletion macro.  This new macro allows authors to ask free response fill in the blank questions with interactive help. As a student types their answer into the answer blank, jQuery's autocomplete feature generates a drop-down list of allowable answers that match what has already been typed.
• The Grades page was overhauled with an number of small modifications. The total percentage score for homeworks is now shown and the "C" has been replaced by a 100. There is also a course homework grade at the bottom of the Grades table.  (This can be turned off on the Course Configuration page if WeBWorK's grading scheme doesn't match with what you use.)

This is the short version of the upgrade instructions.  For the longer version, with commands, visit the release notes on the wiki page at webwork.maa.org/wiki/Release_notes_for_WeBWorK_2.12

1. Go to /opt/webwork/webwork2, as well as /opt/webwork/pg and run git pull origin master on each directory (assuming that origin is your remote name for the openwebwork repo).
2. Depending on your system there may be new perl modules added for 2.12. Run check_modules.pl and look for missing modules. They may include:
• Digest::SHA
3. You should also run pdflatex /opt/webwork/webwork2/bin/check_latex.tex and look for missing latex packages. They may include
• fullpage (If you are missing fullpage it is in the texlive-latex-extra package in apt based distributions and texlive-preprint in yum/dnf distributions.)
4. Check localOverrides.conf.dist and look for changes to add to the existing localOverrides.conf
• Library Statistics - This is a new feature (see below). There are variables which control whether or not global and local problem statistics are shown in the library browser.
• Problem Re-Randomization - The problem rerandomization feature (see below) has default options which need to be set.
5. Check your apache configuration file and look for changes to add to your existing configuration file. In particular you may need to add the following
• Code to set the location of the pg directory as an environment variable
• A line to set the server admin email
6. Check your courses.dist/modelCourse/course.conf and look for changes against your course.conf file. They may include:
• Removing a number of outdated settings.
• Commented out settings for controlling which instructors can see which students.
7. Restart the webserver.

## Gotchas

• I cannot access the admin course. This could be because you have not run upgrade_admin_db.pl yet.
• I cannot generate a "one column" hardcopy. You may be missing the fullpage latex package. In apt based systems its part of the package texlive-latex-extra and in yum/dnf based systems its part of texlive-preprint
• I see little vertical lines next to MathJax rendered formulas. This is caused by an incompatibility between older versions of MathJax and Chrome. Update MathJax with cd /opt/webwork/MathJax and git pull to fix the problem.
• I do not see links to some of the editors in the Main Menu, including the links to Problem Set Detail 2, or I get an error about "SimplePGEditor". To fix this remove the definition of the %showeditors from localOverrides.conf. This hash should be defined in defaults.config and if you want to change things in localOverrides.conf you should set hash elements individually.
• I can't get LTI to work. First make sure that you are using the new version of LTI. (Make a fresh copy of authen_LTI.conf from the distribution file.) Also enable the $debug_lti_parameters flag. For security reasons the default error messages from the LTI module are very vague. • I dont see the Library Statistics. Make sure that you have enable the appropriate flags in localOverrides.conf (see the first section of this page) and run OPL-update ## May 01, 2016 ### Geoff Goehle #### Python in WeBWorK Do you dream of using WeBWorK to teach students Python? If so then you have very specific dreams. After the jump I will talk about a new set of macros recently created for use in CS courses at WCU. Rather than creating an automated program tester, of which there are many, these macros are really aimed at filling the gap between labs and projects that we have in our introductory computer science courses. ## Introduction In our introductory computer science courses there seems to be something of a gap between lecture and labs, where students are introduced to new features and concepts in Python, and class projects, which are larger relatively involved programs meant to test and expand students knowledge of the concepts. Outside of weekly labs there isn't any opportunity for students to practice basic syntax and concepts, however. Our goal is to create weekly homework assignments which will help students improve their fundamentals. Of course we want to bring along the instantaneous grading and feedback that are a hallmark of WeBWorK. To accomplish this we have created a collection of PG macros. The macros provide access to two main types objects, the first is the PythonOutput object. The pg file will include a short Python script that will be used to create the object. The code is then run and the standard output of the script will be the correct answer for the problem. The basic idea is that you will present the code to students and ask them what the output will be. For example: This problem is testing if the student understands the formatting syntax for Python strings. The students answer will be compared exactly, using none of the smart comparisons you might usually expect from WeBWorK. (Of course students could just run the code and check the output, but that is not the absolute worst learning outcome.) The second type of object is a PythonCode. The pg file will include a short Python script that is used to create the object, just as before. However, in this case the student's will provide their own python script. The output of the student's Python script will be compared to the output of the "correct" Python script. The basic template for this kind of problem is that students will be provided with a description of what their code should do and will need to write a script to fulfil that description. This problem asks students to create a script which reads the first argument provided to the script, and if it is equal to 1 then print out the contents of the standard input, and print "hello" otherwise. (You can specify the arguments and contents of stdin in the pg file; more on that later.) These types of problems will probably work better if students are asked to write relatively short scripts, however there is support for running fairly complicated scripts including running multiple test cases. Of course, since you are running code provided by students via a web browser, security is going to be a concern. All Python code evaluated using this system is run in a code jail based on the EDX code jail. In particular the code is run as a separate user using a specially cordoned off python executable. Using AppArmor the python executable (python3 in our case) is only allowed to access the python libraries in the sand box and temporary files created by the jailing code. Because the enforcement happens at the kernel level via AppArmor, the system is reasonably secure ## Object Methods Lets take a closer look at the methods available to these objects and then we will do a deeper dive in actually coding problems. PythonCode() and PythonObject() For both objects these constructor methods takes the Python code as a string input and returns the object. Generally you would generally do something like: $python = PythonCode(<<EOP);for i in range(0,10):  print("The number is {}".format(i))EOP

code()

This either sets or returns the code used to run the object.

options()

This method takes in various options which can be used to provide the code things like standard input, command line arguments, and even files with text. The possibilities are:

• files=>[['file_name','content'],['file_name_2','other content']] - This is a list (reference) of (references to) pairs, each pair is a filename and a bytestring of contents to write into that file. These files will be created in a jailed tmp directory and cleaned up automatically. No subdirectories are supported in the filename. The files will be available to the jailed code in its current directory.
• argv=>['arg1','arg2'] - This is an array ref of command-line arguments which will be provided to the code.
• stdin=>"This string \n will be \n in stdin." - This is a string and will be provided to the code through the stdin channel.

tests() (For PythonCode objects only)

This is used to provide the code with a (ref) list of hash references each containing one or more entries for "argv", "files", or "stdin" with the format described above. The correct code and the student code will be run once for each set of inputs and the output of the correct code and the student code will be compared. A correct answer is when the student code output matches the correct output in all of the test cases.

error() (For PythonObject objects only)

This will return the error type (e.g. "TypeError" or "SyntaxError") for the Python code, if there is one. This overrides the standard output as the correct answer, if there is an error.

evaluate()

This runs the jailed code. It returns the status of the jailed code. The stdout and stderr of the code are stored in the stdout and stderr attributes.

status()

This returns the status of evaluated code.

stdout()

This returns the stdout output of evaluated code.

stderr()

This returns the stderr output of evaluated code.

cmp()

This returns a comparator for the object. For PythonOutput the students answer is compared to the stdout of the code. If there is a runtime error then the correct answer is the class of the error (i.e SyntaxError). For PythonCode the students answer is run as python code and the two outputs are compared for equality. If there is data for multiple collections of test input, then the outputs will be compared for all of the collections.

## Examples

Lets take a look at a couple of examples in greater depth. The following code is for a problem which tests if students can parse the logic of an if statement.

DOCUMENT();      # We use PGML for these problems because it provides code and # preformatted environments that are useful for presenting code and # output.  We also include the WCUCSmacros file.  loadMacros(   "PGstandard.pl",    "PGML.pl",   "WCUCSmacros.pl");TEXT(beginproblem());$val = random(1,50);$val2 = random(1,50);while($val ==$val2) { $val2 = random(1,255); }# There are an assortment of helper functions in WCUMacros # which can provide random text strings and variable names.$stringt = random_phrase();$stringf = random_phrase();while($stringt eq $stringf) {$stringf = random_phrase(); }# We define the actual python object, with the code here. # Notice the correct Python formatting and the Perl # interpolated values.  $code = PythonOutput(<<EOS);finished = Truescore =$valnum = $val2if not finished and score > 20: print("$stringt") else:    print("$stringf")EOS# Here we actually evaluate the code. You if you skip this step# the stdout attribute won't be populated. It is done manually so # that you can set options before it is run.$code->evaluate();# Here we have the text of the problem.  Notice the code wrapped in#  and the answer blank definition with the comparator.  BEGIN_PGMLDetermine the printed output of the following section of code and write it in the answer box below.  If the code will not run because of a syntax error enter "SyntaxError".  If the code produces a runtime error enter the type of the error. Code:[@ $code->code @]Output: [____]{$code->cmp}{50}END_PGML#  Here we have the solution.  The ":   " makes preformatted text.  BEGIN_PGML_SOLUTIONThe correct output is::   [@ $code->stdout @] END_PGML_SOLUTIONENDDOCUMENT(); When the code is rendered it looks like the following. Here we have provided an incorrect answer and asked the correct answer to be displayed. It is useful to note that the numerical value for score can end up being bigger or smaller than 20. So, assuming we had set finished = True, we could have had the result of the conditional depend on the problem seed, which is a good thing. What is more, because the answer is determined by the Python code itself, all of the quirks of the language will be faithfully recreated. Next lets look at a more complicated example where students are asked to write a program. In particular we are going to ask students to read in a file name from the first argument, open the file and print its contents to stdout. The pg code looks like this: DOCUMENT(); loadMacros( "PGstandard.pl", "PGML.pl", "WCUCSmacros.pl",);TEXT(beginproblem());# Here is our "correct" Python code. (We do not actually have to # evaluate the code because we are using test cases.)$code = PythonCode(<<EOS);import sysif (len(sys.argv) != 2):   print('No filename provided.')   exit()filename = sys.argv[1]fh = open(filename);print(fh.read())EOS# We can use the random_word macro to come up with random words# for variable and file names. $filename = random_word().'.txt';# This is where we populate the input data for our tests. We have # two tests. One has an argument with the file name, an a file # with that name and a random phrase.$code->tests({argv => [$filename], files=>[[$filename,random_phrase()]]},# The second test has a file, but no argument. In this case the script will # exit silently.               {files=>[[random_word().'.txt','This should not be read.']]});# Here is the PGML for the problem text.  Notice the markdown style text# text formatting.  BEGIN_PGMLWrite a Python script which will do the following:* It should accept the name of a file as a command line argument.* If there is not exactly one command line argument it should print the string _No flename provided._ and exit.  * If there is a command line argument it should open that file and print the contents.  Code:  [_______]*{$code->cmp}END_PGML# We can also provide our code as a solution. BEGIN_PGML_SOLUTIONSolution Code:[@$code->code @]END_PGML_SOLUTIONENDDOCUMENT();        

Now lets take a look at what this looks like when run. In the following we have an example of a student submitting a script that opens the file and prints it, but does not check the number of arguments first.

Notice that students are shown the results of each of their tests, as well as any errors that were reported during any tests. The "show correct answer" output shows the correct output, and the correct code is contained in the popover for the correct answer. In addition the system will use pylint to comment on their syntax and formatting. When it finds errors it will post them in a comment box like the one below.

These features represent the basic foundation of our python macros. As we actually write problems and use them in class I'm sure we will come up with new features and best practices. Check back in a couple of semesters to see how things have progressed.

## March 05, 2016

### Geoff Goehle

#### OPL Statistics

A feature recently added to the development branch of WeBWorK (to be released in 2.12) is the option to display problem statistics in the Library Browser.  You can display local statistics, which are local to your university, or "global" statistics which were generated using data contributed by a number of different institutions.  Find out more below, including how you can contribute your data to the global repository.

If you use the Library Browser in the development version of WeBWorK you may notice that the problems have some extra data in the "header" portion.
The three quantities displayed are:

• Usage - The total number of students who have had the problem assigned to them.
• Attempts - The average number of attempts students have made on this problem.
• Status - The average status that students ended up with.
In general problems with high usage numbers don't have bugs because they have been so thoughoutly tested.  Problems with a large number of attempts are harder for students to do, and if the average status is well below 85% or 90% then it means a significant number of students are never able to do the problem correctly.  (Especially considering most people allow students an unlimited number of attempts.) All three of these quantities are useful when you are deciding to add a problem to your homework set.  Do you intend for all students to be able to do the problem?  How much effort will they need to put in to it? Etc...

The difference between GLOBAL and LOCAL statistics is that Local statistics are generated only from the student data on your WeBWorK server, while Global statistics are generated from a central database of contributed data.  Currently the Global statistics database has data on 23000 problems with an average of 367 assigned students per problem. The data was donated by over 15 different institutions.

How can you use this feature yourself?  It is pretty straightforward.  First you need to set the following variables in your localOverrides.conf file.
# This flag controls if local statistics are shown in the library
$problemLibrary{showLibraryLocalStats} = 1; # This flag controls whether global statistics will be displayed$problemLibrary{showLibraryGlobalStats} = 1;
You also need to generate the statistics (or import it in the case of the global statistics table).  To do this just run
webwork2/bin/update-OPL-statistics
It is recommended that you run this once at the beginning of each semester to keep your local data tables up to date.  And that's it!  You need to make sure the feature is enabled and that you run the data generating script on a regular basis.  If you want to go a step further you can donate your local data to the central database.  Only aggregate data (e.g. total number of times a problem was assigned, average status on a problem, average number of attempts) is transmitted.  In particular no student data ever leaves your server.  If you decide you want to donate your data just run
The script will ask you some questions, generate a .tar.gz. file, and upload it to the central server.  It leaves behind a copy of the .tar.gz file in case you want to see what exactly is transmitted.

• Course Grade Mode: In this mode you create a single link/assignment in the LMS which points to WeBWorK.  WeBWorK will then return the "cumulative" homework grade as a percentage to the LMS.  In other words the grade in the LMS column is the course homework grade.
• Homework Grade Mode:  In this mode you create a single link/assignment in the LMS for each problem set in WeBWorK.  WeBWorK will then return the total score for the problem set to the LMS.  In other words you will have multiple columns in the LMS gradebook, one for each link, and they will be filled out with the student scores on individual WeBWorK problem sets.
The first mode is the easiest to set up, but the second mode is more granular and ends up transferring more data to the LMS gradebook.

#### First Time Setup

There are several configuration variables in authen_LTI.conf which need to be set to enable grade passback.

$LTIGradeMode - If this variable is not set then the grade passback feature is turned off. If it is set to "course" then the Course Grade Mode described above is used. If it is set to "homework" then the Homework Grade Mode described above is used.$LTIGradeOnSubmit - If this flag is enabled then WeBWorK will attempt to update student grades every time they submit an answer to a problem.  This keeps the student grades current, but can be a drain on your server.  If either the WeBWorK server or the LMS server bogs down it might be a good idea to turn this off.

$LTIMassUpdateInterval - Because instructor activities like adding new sets, deleting problems, or marking problems correct can change student grades we periodically update all student grades just to make sure things are current. This interval controls how often that mass update happens. It is set for once every 24 hours by default. In addition to configuring WeBWorK you may also need to enable the grading feature on your LMS. How this works varies among different LMS. I will describe how to configure Blackboard, Moodle, and Canvas. • Blackboard - There is a global flag which controls if Tools are allowed to submit grades. You will need administrator access to change this. • In the Administrator Panel go to Building Blocks > LTI Tool Providers > Global Properties • Enable the setting to allow any Tool Provider to post grades to the Grade Center. • Moodle - There is a flag which controls if Tools are allowed to submit grades. This can be set for individual courses or site wide. • Go to Site administration > Plugins > Activity modules > LTI > Manage external tool types. • Edit the WeBWorK tool and under Privacy enable "Accept grades from the tool". • Canvas - Grade passback is always enabled in Canvas and requires no global configuration. #### Adding Graded Links You add links to WeBWorK the same way you do if you are just using the authentication feature. In particular you create an "Assignment/Link" and provide the url of the WeBWorK course. The only additional thing you have to worry about is setting up the grade. In general you need to make sure grading is enabled for the link and set the total number of points the assignment is work. It is recommended that you use 100 points so that the grade looks like a percentage. However, the grade given to the student will always be a percentage of the total available points so you can use however many points you want. I'll describe the specifics for Blackboard, Moodle and Canvas. • Blackboard: You need to make sure "Enable Evaluation" is set to yes. You can also set the number of points available and the due date of the assignment. • Moodle: All you need to do is set the points possible as well as any of the other Moodle specific options. • Canvas: All you need to do is set the number of points possible. Its important to remember that the only information transferred from WeBWorK to the LMS is the percentage grade of the assignment. In particular things like visibility and due dates are not automatically synchronized. It is recommended that you do not set due dates in the LMS and allow WeBWorK to control the availability of the problem sets. #### Course Grade Mode Lets look at an example of Blackboard set up with Course Grade mode. Here we have a single link to our WeBWorK course in the Content area. Students will use this link to access WeBWorK. Once in WeBWorK they navigate and finish problem sets in exactly the same way they normally would. WeBWorK behaves just as it would if there were no LMS at all. The only difference is when students submit a grade they should get a message like the one below. Note: In many LMS instructors do not have grades. In this case you will see the message "Your score was not successfully sent to the LMS". This is fine, unless its not. If you suspect that there is a problem enable$debug_lti_parameters to see more verbose error messages.  The goal is to see the following in WeBWorK (if you don't have Homework Totals in your version of WeBWorK don't worry, its not out until 2.12)
and the following in Blackboard

And that is pretty much it.  The Course Grade Mode is not particularly complex.  Some things to remember:
• How the WeBWorK grade is used in the "Total Grade" on the LMS is entirely up to you and how you have set the weights in the LMS.  See the documentation for the LMS for how to set weights on grades.
• Only make one (graded) link to WeBWorK.  If you make more than one then your gradebook will have multiple columns and WeBWorK will get confused about which one to send the grade back to.
• Users have to log in to WeBWorK via the LMS at least once for this to work.  The easiest way to guarantee this is to make the LMS create the users.  However, once they have logged in via the LMS once they can log in directly via WeBWorK after that (assuming your authentication system is set up that way).

This grading mode is more granular in that students get all of their homework grades, as well as any other LMS grades, all in one place.  The cost is that you need to set up a separate link to each WeBWorK problem set.  For example in this Canvas course we have links to three different WeBWorK assignments
The links are set up exactly the same as described in the previous post with the exception that they should point to the homework set that they correspond to.  For example a link to the Orientation set would have the url
(i.e https://webwork.server.edu/webwork2/TestCourse/Orientation)
In general the link to set <set name> should have the following format:

• Default or Just-In-Time Set: http://<server address>/webwork2/<course name>/<set name>
• Gateway: http://<server address>/webwork2/<course name>/quiz_mode/<set name>
• Proctored Gateway: http://<server address>/webwork2/<course name>/proctored_quiz_mode/<set name>
If the set name is not somewhere in the url for that set on the LMS side then it is incorrect.  Once things are set up students then click on the links to access their homework and complete their assignments as normal.  If things are working then they should see their grades appear in the LMS.
There are a couple of caveats.

• Students have to click on the link corresponding to the set at least once for grading to work.  Once in WeBWorK they can navigate like normal.  However, if they try to navigate to sets which are open, but which they haven't visited via the LMS get get messages like

• Homework due dates and problem totals are not synced between WeBWorK and the LMS.  The easiest thing to do is to set all of the homework sets to be open forever in the LMS and let WeBWorK manage access to the homework sets.  You can also set the number of points for each set to 100 in the LMS and the score will be a percentage.  You can also keep the due dates and number of points synchronized, but you will have to do so by hand.
• Also note that depending on how you weight things in the LMS the contributions of the homework to the total grade in the LMS will be different than the Homework Total in WeBWorK.  (In particular the WeBWorK grade is the total number of points earned over the points available, while, assuming you set the points to 100 for every assignment in the LMS, the LMS grade is the average of all the homework percentages.)  You can turn off displaying the Homework Total in WeBWorK using the Course Configuration menu if this bothers you or your students.
In general using Homework Grade mode is more work, but if you make heavy use of an LMS it is probably worth it.  You can use different grade modes in different courses by setting the $LTIGradeMode variable in the course.conf file. So you are not locked into using one type of grading for all of your courses. #### Hardcopy Themes Are you tired of the standard "two column" hardcopy format that has been used by WeBWorK since the project was started? Well starting in version 2.12 there is the option to choose a "hardcopy theme". Currently there is are two themes, a one column mode and a two column mode. However, the system is build so that you could add your very own. Choosing a hardcopy theme is simplicity itself. When generating a hardcopy simply choose "One Column" or "Two Columns" for the Hardcopy Theme option. You will get either this: or this: You can also set the default theme on the Course Configuration page. In particular the theme chosen on the Course Configuration page is the only theme that students are allowed to use. Unless you are willing to get your hands dirty, then that is the extent of the feature. However, there is also the possibility of adding new Hardcopy themes to the mix. To create a new theme you need to add a folder to the webwork2/conf/snippets/hardcopyThemes folder. This new folder should contain the following files: • hardcopyPreamble.tex - This tex file contains the LaTeX code that will be at the beginning of the hardcopy. This is where all of the preamble code goes, including packages, macros, page formatting, etc... • hardcopyPostamble.tex - This tex file contains the LaTeX code that will be at the end of the hardcopy. It ends the document. • hardcopyProblemDivider.tex - This tex file contains the LaTeX code that will be inserted between each problem. • hardcopySetDivider.tex - This tex file contains the LaTeX code that will be inserted between each set. • hardcopyUserDivider.tex - This tex file contains the LaTeX code that will be inserted between each user. • hardcopySetHeader.pg - Normally this pg file would be rendered and placed at the top of each set. However, most sets now have their own Hardcopy Header file specified on the Set Detail page which takes precedence over this one. • hardcopySetFooter.pg - This pg file is rendered and the resulting tex code is put at the bottom of each set. The changes you make to these files, in particular the hardcopyPreamble.tex file, will control what the resulting hardcopy looks like. You could put more space between problems by adding a vspace to the problem divider. You can add university specific detailing to the footers. You could change the font or margins. Once you have gotten the hardcopy format you desire its time to add it to WeBWorK. In order to do that you should add overiddes to the following variables in localOverrides.conf. # Available Hardcopy themes (located in snippets)$hardcopyThemes = [qw(oneColumn twoColumn)];
# Hardcopy theme names (pretty names for themes)
$hardcopyThemeNames = {oneColumn => 'One Column', twoColumn => 'Two Columns'}; # Default Hardcopy them$hardcopyTheme = "twoColumn";
The theme name (e.g. oneColumn, twoColumn) should be the name of the folder you made in hardcopyThemes.   The pretty theme name (e.g. One Column, Two Columns) is the name that is actually displayed to users.  Once you add your theme to $hardcopyThemes and$hardcopyThemeNames you are done.  The theme will automatically appear on the Hardcopy page and the Course Configuration page as an option.  If you make a particularly good theme, please consider contributing it to the main repository so other people can use it.

The grades page in WeBWorK has seen some changes for the next version (2.12).  In particular homework percentages are now displayed for each homework and a "Homework Totals" score is displayed as well.  This post also presents an existing feature which most people may not know about; how to display external grades in WeBWorK.

There have been a number of tweaks made to the grades page, as you can see below.
The two main changes are the addition of a percent score for individual homework sets and a Homework Totals score for all sets.  The Homework Totals score is the total number of points earned out of the total available points.  In particular, it matches the score you would get using the Scoring Tools page if you selected all homework sets.  If you want to change the weight of a homework set simply change the value of all of the problems in the set.  (For example if you set the value of all the problems in the set to zero then the sets grade doesn't count toward the Homework Total.)  If you do something entirely different with your homework scores and don't want students to get the wrong impression from the Homework Total, you can turn the feature off in the Course Configuration page.
Another feature, which isn't new but most people don't know about, is the ability to display external grades in WeBWorK.  The pertinent message on the grades page is
In particular lets use the Email link to create the following message and save it as report_grades.msg

Hello $FN Your grade for midterm 2 is$COL[7]

Your 6th week grade is $COL[-1] Recall that when you are emailing students you can choose a Merge File to include data from a csv in your email. The exact same macros are used in the report_grades.msg. The list of available macros is: •$FN - first name
• $LN - last name •$SID - student ID number
• $SECTION - student's section •$RECITATION - student's recitation
• $STATUS - C, drop, withdrawl, audit, etc. •$EMAIL - student's email address
• $LOGIN - student's login name •$COL[3] - third column in merge file

#### Def File Changes

Because of all the new features added to WeBWorK the way problems are defined in def files needed to be refactored. Now problems in def files are defined using the same "property = value" format as the rest of the problem set. You can read more about the new def format at http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Set_Definition_Files (specifically the Problem List Version 2 portion). Older def files using the "version 1" problem list can still be imported, but all exports will use version 2.

#### XMLRPC Rendering

Driven by the Mathbook XML project http://mathbook.pugetsound.edu/ and the Moodle opaqueserver linkage the ability to render problems via the XMLRPC pathway has been greatly improved. In particular problems can be embedded in pages using iframes. The embedded problems can be interacted with, answers can be checked, and there is even the option to store answers and scores locally in the browser.

#### Live Graph 3D

The java based Live Graph 3D grapher has been replaced by a drop in javascript alternative. This javascript alternative is webGL based and should work on any device which has webGL support. It should work as a replacement without any additional configuration.  This grapher has been tested with the existing problems in the OPL which used the old java grapher. If there are issues with local problems please report them.

• wwsh: Due to recent changes in Perl wwsh no longer gives you an interactive perl interface. Instead you call wwsh with a script as follows wwsh <course name> <script name>. Several scripts have been provided to help recover courses.
• Set Defs Search: You can now set configuration variables which allow the Homework Sets Editor page to search for set def files in folders other than templates. In particular it can look for def files in subdirectories of templates and optionally in the OPL.
• No More Timezones: Timezones in date entry have been removed, as have most time zones in displayed dates. (Due dates displayed to students still have time zones.) Now all times are interpreted to be in the time zone defined in the Course Configuration page. This should eliminate the longstanding problem of entering a date with the wrong daylight savings timezone and having your time unexpectedly shifted by an hour.
• Library Browser Icons: There are now icons in the library browser to help signify when problems use math objects and when problems don’t have any randomization.
• Course Renaming: In addition to renaming courses you can now give courses new Course Titles and new Institutions. This is done using the Rename function on the course admin page.
• Numerous Bug Fixes:  Many bug fixes, most of which can be found listed in the release notes.

1)  Go to /opt/webwork/webwork2, /opt/webwork/pg and run
git pull origin master
on each directory (assuming that origin is your remote name for the openwebwork repo).

2) Depending on your system there may be new perl modules added for 2.11. Run check_modules.pl and look for missing modules. They may include:
LWP::Protocol::https (version > 6.06)
Class::Accessor
An outdated LWP::Protocol::https module can keep the Library Browser from running correctly if you are using https.

3) Check localOverrides.conf.dist and look for changes to add to the existing localOverrides.conf. There are a couple of important things here that will negatively affect your system if you don't deal with them.

The show editors hash should be removed. If it is not removed then there will be minor annoyances (e.g. the link to the problem set detail page that appears when you are looking at a homework set will not appear). Instead of redefining this hash, overrides should be made to the hash elements individually. For example
# These will enable the versions of the problem set detail page and library browser page that do not use the xmlrpc pathway
#$showeditors{problemsetdetail1} = 1; #$showeditors{librarybrowsernojs} = 1;

# This will enable the slightly fancier PG problem editor 3
#$showeditors{pgproblemeditor3} = 1; # This will turn off ww3 (if you are on the ww3 branch) #$showeditors{ww3} = 0;

While this does not appear by default in localOverrides.conf.dist, something you may want to modify using localOverrides.conf is the variable controlling which files users with professor privilege can access. For security reasons default only users with admin privilege will be able to access course.conf using the File Manager. The variable you would change is
# For safety reasons these course specific files cannot be edited from the File Manager except by an administrator.  These are paths relative to the course directory.
$uneditableCourseFiles = ['simple.conf', 'course.conf', ]; Options which control if the homework sets editor will look for set .def files in places other than templates. In can search in subfolders of templates or even the OPL. The options are # Searching for set.def files to import # Uncomment below so that when the homework sets editor searches for set def # files, it searches beyond templates; it can search deeper subfolders of # templates, and optionally also descend into Library #$options{setDefSearchDepth}=4; #search down 4 levels
#$options{useOPLdefFiles}=1; 4) Check site-conf.dist and look for changes to add to the existing site.conf. Things to look for include: The version of your server is determined automatically from your server banner. However, if you have turned off the version in your server banner you can specify it manually with$server_apache_version = ''; # e.g. '2.22.1'

Specifying if tls is allowed when sending email. This is enabled via
$tls_allowed = 1; Specifying an email address to display when apache has problems with webwork pages, assuming you don't want to use the default apache admin email. This is done via$webwork_server_admin_email ='';

Specifying a default timeout for the checkurl command. This is done via
$externalPrograms{checkurl} = "/usr/bin/lwp-request -d -t 40 -mHEAD "; 5) Check your apache configuration dist file and look for changes to add to the existing apache configuration file. Things to look for include A line which ensures that each apache child process has a different random number seed. The main impact this has is that without the following line practice users are not shuffled randomly. PerlChildInitHandler "sub { srand }" The code which overrides the administrator email using the variable mentioned in the previous section. The code looks like my$webwork_server_admin_email = $ce->{webwork_server_admin_email}; if ($webwork_server_admin_email) {
$webwork_server_admin_email =$ce->{webwork_server_admin_email};
warn "set email from site.conf";
} else {
$webwork_server_admin_email=$ENV{SERVER_ADMIN};
}

Optional code to make use of the opaque server interface with Moodle.

Optional code to improve performance by using mod_expires.

6) Restart the webserver. (with apachectl graceful or similar command.)

cd /opt/webwork/libraries/webwork-open-problem-library
git pull origin
OPL-update

### Gotchas

• You can't edit the course.conf file: You need "admin" permissions. See item 2 of Primary Changes.
• You can't find the "SetName" link in the sidebar that normally brings you to the Problem Set Detail page for a particular set: You need to remove the %showEditors hash from your local overrides file. See item 4 of Upgrade Instructions.
• The library browser may stop responding: When you select a subject the chapter list may not populate and you may get error popups. The main cause of this is a missing or outdated LWP::Protocol::https (version < 6.06) package.
• Remember to update the OPL and run OPL-update.

## October 09, 2015

### Michael Gage

#### Using WeBWorK questions in Moodle quizzes -- the Moodle/WeBWorK question bridge

This is a copy of a post that I made to the Moodle forum on Quizzes.

I’m happy to announce a version of WeBWorK that can serve mathematics questions via a Moodle quiz.  This gives a tighter connection between Moodle and WeBWorK, allowing students to work exclusively with the Moodle quiz interface while WeBWorK produces the mathematics questions and processes the student answers in the background.  The result is similar to using STACK to produce and process mathematics questions.

This is a first attempt at realizing the question level WeBWorK-Moodle bridge which I proposed in this forum in my earlier post last January ( https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=277922) and on my blog (http://michaelgage.blogspot.com/2015/01/connecting-webwork-to-moodle-2xs.html )

It makes most of the 25K+ mathematics questions written for WeBWorK’s OpenProblemLibrary (http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Open_Problem_Library) available for use in Moodle quizzes as well.  The OPL began with questions designed for single and multivariable calculus courses (and that is still the majority of the collection) but has expanded in both up and down to include questions for linear algebra and differential equations, complex variables, operations research, and statistics; as well as precalculus and developmental mathematics problems and many other math subjects.

To see this Moodle/WeBWorK connection in action,  view the Moodle course for linear algebra and differential equations at (https://devel3.webwork.rochester.edu/moodle/course/view.php?id=21).  You will need to login as “visitor”, using the password “visitor” in order to view the quizzes. (Guests are not allowed to view Moodle quizzes.)

This is  a mockup of the matrix algebra/ODE course which I taught in 2009 using the Moodle/WeBWorK assignment connection (which presents an entire homework assignment using the WeBWorK interface).  In each week  you’ll see the original WeBWorK assignment that I used (the icon is a yellow spider web on blue background) and near it the Moodle Quiz version of the same assignment.  Try each of them to get a comparison between the WeBWorK/Moodle assignment bridge and the new WeBWorK/Moodle question bridge.

I have set the behavior of the Moodle Quiz so that it closely approximates the original WeBWorK assignment.  These assignments are meant primarily for homework/practice not for normative assessment.  The student can retry each question as often as she wishes and if there are several answer blanks then evaluation is given separately for each blank.

The Moodle portion of this bridge is built on the Opaque question type module implemented by Tim Hunt for interfacing with webservice test engines.  I am indebted to Tim for help and advice while I was implementing this Moodle/WeBWorK question interface.

Information for installing and configuring the Moodle Opaque question type is available on github at https://github.com/moodleou.  Specifically you need the opaque qtype module:  https://github.com/moodleou/moodle-qtype_opaque and the opaque behaviour module:  https://github.com/moodleou/moodle-qbehaviour_opaque.

I’ll provide more detailed suggestions for creating your own Moodle/WeBWorK questions later but for those somewhat familiar with both WeBWorK and Moodle here is the short explanation.
1. You create a new Opaque engine pointing to the url: https://devel3.webwork.rochester.edu/opaqueserver_wsdl and set the question bank URL for the engine to https://devel3.webwork.rochester.edu/webwork2/spring09mth165 .
2. For each question the questionID should be the same as the path of a WeBWorK problem in the OpenProblemLibrary with the following replacements.
The initial segment should be “library” instead of “Library”, each slash is replaced by two underscores, and each hyphen is replaced by three underscores. (This is required in order to conform to the Opaque client naming scheme.)
For example:
Library/Rochester/setAlgebra01RealNumbers/lhp1_31-34_mo.pg
is obtained using the questionID:
library__Rochester__setAlgebra01RealNumbers__lhp1_31___34_mo.pg

For those who are really impatient the WeBWorK server function is provided by adding the project opaque_server along side a standard WeBWorK course. The Opaque Server can be found at (https://github.com/openwebwork/opaque_server) along with minimal documentation for installing.

This is the first version of the Moodle/WeBWorK question bridge so the behavior may change slightly in the future.  Because STACK and WeBWorK are already very similar I would be interested in creating a question type that was interchangeable between the two background mathematics engines.  Instructors would be able to mix STACK and WeBWorK questions in the same quiz in such a way that it was invisible (or nearly invisible) to students which engine was handling the question.

-- Mike Gage, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

## February 09, 2015

### John Travis

#### Upcoming WeBWorK related PREP summer workshops

Registration has just been opened for two faculty development workshop to be held during Summer 2015 through the MAA's Professional Enhancement Program (PREP).

The first one is a repeat of a very well received workshop offered the past two summers:

Davide Cervone, Gavin LaRose,
Paul Pearson, and John Travis

June 8, 15, 22, and 29, 2015

This online workshop introduces participants to the technical skills necessary to identify, edit and create high-quality WeBWorK problems.  Participants new to WeBWorK will also be provided an extra workshop introducing them to WeBWorK as well.  Two sessions (about 2 hours each) will be provided on each date noted above.

The second offering is a new course aimed for potential WeBWorK system administrators:

Mike Gage, Jason Aubrey, Geoff Goehle,
Danny Glin, and John Travis

July 6, 13, 14, and 20, 2015

Participants in this online workshop will cover the technical skills necessary to install and maintain a robust, reliable, and secure WeBWorK server.  In particular, participants will be walked through the steps necessary for installing WeBWorK on their own servers.  Most days will include morning and afternoon sessions.

Advance registration for these workshops is $175 (before posted deadlines) and is available at We are looking forward to a full house for both workshops. Previous workshops have required us to close registration so if you are interested in either then please make plans to register soon. Questions about either workshop: travis@mc.edu ## January 19, 2015 ### Michael Gage #### Connecting WeBWorK to Moodle 2.x's question type for use in Moodle quizzes. This note was posted on moodle's quiz forum on January 7, 2015. https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=277922 I am working on plugging WeBWorK in as a back end for analyzing mathematics questions in a way similar to STACK. I will be using the opaque question type as a starting place. I am just beginning this project and I expect to have questions for this forum as I proceed so I thought it a good idea to introduce myself. I am Mike Gage, a math professor at the University of Rochester, (Rochester, NY, USA) and one of the originators of the open source online homework system WeBWorK. It was originally designed to deal with mathematics at the calculus level but it now has questions from middle school through ordinary differential equations, linear algebra and complex analysis. It already interoperates with Moodle as an assignment module -- there is single sign-on between Moodle and WeBWorK and after the student finishes their WeBWorK homework assignment the grades are returned to the google grade book. My goal is to make WeBWorK work as a question type for Moodle2.x. We already have a question type version for Moodle1.9 For those interested here is an example of a course using WeBWorK for assignments (search for the spiderweb icon and click on it). https://hosted2.webwork.rochester.edu/moodle/course/view.php?id=3 For those interested in an example of WeBWorK being used to create question types in Moodle 1.9 (Created by Matt Leventi in 2007) https://devel1.webwork.rochester.edu/moodle/mod/quiz/attempt.php?q=256&forcenew=1 (you can log in using the guest button). This version could use improvement but I don't plan to work on this further unless there is a large demand -- it seems better to put the effort into a Moodle2.x version. Finally for those interested in WeBWorK in its native form you can look at this link: https://hosted2.webwork.rochester.edu/webwork2/2014_07_UR_demo/ (you can login using the guest button) The home wiki for WeBWorK is http://webwork.maa.org/wiki Thank you in advance for considering the questions I will have as I start on adapting the opaque question type to WeBWorK. Take care, Mike ## January 04, 2015 ### Geoff Goehle #### Release 2.10 We are happy to announce the release of WeBWorK version 2.10, now available from your friendly neighborhood github repository. This new version features many additions. For example the Show Me Another feature allows students to request different versions of existing problems. There are also a number of additions which help bring WeBWorK meet web accessibility standards. For site administrators we have a new "update notification" system so your server will never be out of date again. Read more about it in the release notes or after the jump. This version contains a couple of major new features and a collection of smaller features. Lets go through the larger changes. ## Accessibility: We made a number of changes to the math4 interface to make it much friendlier to screen readers and other accessibility tools. Rather than one large change this is a huge number of small tweaks and improvements. We brought all color contrasts up to AA level and added an easy to see focus box and a skip to main content link. Tables and fields should mostly meet accessibility standards now. The big exception is that fields in problems do not have proper labels. To fix this we added aria labels to fields generated by PG. These labels identify each answer field as "Answer 1", or "Answer 1 Part 1", etc... These are not technical replacements for input labels, but are functional replacements for most screen readers. We also made tweaks to make the student interface of WeBWorK easy to navigate using the tab key, reordered the problem results table to make more sense when read left to right, and added links which change focus from the "correct/incorrect" text to the corresponding field. The VPAT for release version 2.10 can be found here. ## Update Notifier: When properly set up and enabled using the configuration files this feature will notify you when there are updates, or new versions, available for WeBWorK or PG. It will also notify you when there are updates to the OPL and if you need to run OPL-update. The notification appears on the Course Administration page of the admin course. Caution: This uses git ls-remote to check in with the github repositories. If the wait is too long the system can be disabled. You can read more about how to set up and configure this feature here ## Theme Overrides: Using the files math4-overrides.css and math4-overrides.js administrators can include their own js and css in a way which will be compatible with future updates. Using this administrators can change coloring, the header images, or even basic functionality. As an example of how this can be applied we added a red and green variant of the math4 theme. You can read more about it here. ## Show Me Another: When enabled this feature will give students the option of viewing a different version of their current problem. Depending on the configuration this version may or may not come with a solution, hints, the ability to check answers, or the ability to view correct answers. The problem is guaranteed to be different so the feature will fail on problems with no randomization. To enable the feature and adjust its settings go to the PG - Problem Display/Answer Checking portion of the Course Configuration page. Note that in order to use the feature you will need to enable it for each individual problem. You can read more here. ## Reduced Scoring: Changed how reduced scoring works so that instead of a fixed reduced scoring period, each set has an individual "reduced scoring date". After this reduced scoring date students will receive reduced credit for their answers. This reduced scoring date can be set differently for individual sets or even individual students. This can, for example, allow you to extend a due date for a student with reduced credit without changing the due date of the set for the class. You can read more about it here. ## PG Additions: There were a number of new PG macros added which provide some nice functionality and are listed below. • niceTables.pl: This allows problem authors to create tables with a large degree of control, including accessibility support. • contextPercentage.pl: This is a context for Percentages. • contextAlternateDecimal.pl: This context allows ',' instead of '.' as decimal places. • contextAlternateInterval.pl: This context allows ']2,3[' as an alternate notation for open intervals. • contextInequalitySetBuilder.pl: This allows for inequality based set notation. • contextPartition.pl: This allows for partitions of integers. • contextPermutation.pl: This allows for permutation notation. • parserRoot.pl: This allows for more generalized roots. • scaffold.pl: This new Scaffolding structure is an upgrade to the existing compoundProblem series of macros. ## Smaller Changes: There are also a bunch of smaller changes and improvements. You can find the full(ish) list at the release notes page here. The most important ones are listed below. • Changed password hashing to use SHA512. This allows passwords to be functionally longer than 6 characters and is much safer. • Added option to use a custom file in place of "site-info.txt". This will keep git from overwriting your site-info.txt changes. • Changed how display options work so that they are persistent. Now there will be no "Display Options" sidebar menu. Instead these are set in the "User Settings" page (formerly the "Password/Email" page) and persist across page calls and logins. • Removed the configuration option for Drag Math. The feature can still be enabled in course.conf • Removed the configuration option for pgMatrixMacros since those have been replaced by MathObjects. The flag can still be modified in course.conf. • Fixed a bug where fileFromPath and read_whole_problem didn't work on newer systems. ## Upgrading Because of the number of additions and upgrades since version 2.9, the upgrade process for version 2.10 is more involved. In particular a number of new modules have been added since version 2.9, as well as significant database upgrades. There are also changes to the configuration files which will need to be integrated into your existing configurations. The process for upgrading to 2.10 is described below.: 1) Go to /opt/webwork/webwork2, /opt/webwork/pg and run git pull origin master on each directory (assuming that origin is your remote name for the openwebwork repository). 2) There were a number of new perl modules added for 2.10. Run check_modules.pl and look for missing modules. They may include • Array::Utils • Dancer • Dancer::Plugin::Database • Iterator • Iterator::Util • Path::Class • XML::Parser::EasyTree Install using your distribution's package manager or via cpan cpan Array::Utils Dancer::Plugin::Database Iterator::Util Path::Class XML::Parser::EasyTree 3) There were a couple of new LaTeX packages added for 2.10. Change to a writeable directory outside the webwork2 directory (like ~) Run pdflatex /opt/webwork/webwork2/bin/check_latex.tex and look for missing packages. Added packages include booktabs, tabularx, colortbl, caption, xcolor, path. In apt based systems you may have to install texlive-latex-recommended and yum based systems may have to install texlive-path. Warning: There currently is no package on CentOS 7 which provides the path package. You can manually download and install the Fedora package and it will work. 4) Check localOverrides.conf.dist and look for changes to add to the existing localOverrides.conf. They may include • Information for the Upgrade Notifier. • Information for a local "site_info.txt" file. • Default values for the showMeAnother feature. 5) Check site-conf.dist and look for changes to add to the existing site.conf. They may include paths for the external programs git and curl. 6) Run the upgrade_admin_db.pl command from webwork2/bin to upgrade your admin course database. Warning: You will not be able to access the admin course until you perform this step. 7) Restart the webserver (with apachectl graceful or a similar command). 8) Log into the admin course and upgrade the databases for all of your courses. 9) Download the latest version of the OPL using cd /opt/webwork/libraries/webwork-open-problem-library git pull origin OPL-update Hopefully you dont run into too much trouble or accidentally set your server on fire. If you do have questions or need help, though, feel free to stop by our friendly neighborhood forums or checkout our irc channel. Bugs can be reported at bugzilla or github. Happy upgrading. ## December 22, 2014 ### Geoff Goehle #### Upgrade Notifier Tired of not knowing if your WeBWorK server is up to date? Do you wake up at night worrying that an important security fix was released and you didn't hear about it? Your wishes have been granted by the new Upgrade Notifier feature. This feature will let know you if there are new updates for your chosen WeBWorK, PG, or OPL branch and can even remind you to update your library index. Available now in the develop branch (and coming up in version 2.10) and described in more detail below. The Upgrade Notifier appears on the Course Administration page of the admin course. When you log in you will see something like this: As you can see this installation has fallen behind! There are upgrades available from branch develop in remote origin for WeBWorK and PG. This means that there are commits in the develop branch of the origin remote (usually the openwebwork github repository) which are not in the currently selected git branch on our server. In addition, the OPL is also out of date. Note: The Upgrade Notifier is very much git based in terms of its setup and configuration. In particular you should know about remotes and branches and be running your WeBWorK server from a git based installation. You can read more about github and WeBWorK in this article, or learn git here. Why origin and develop? Well that comes from our configuration file. The upgrade notifier block of localOverrides.conf.dist looks like this: ################################################################################# Repository Information################################################################################ This is where you put your remote and branch for your WeBWorK, PG and OPL# github repositories.# To disable checking for a particular repository, set the remote and branch# variables to be empty strings.$enableGitUpgradeNotifier = 1;$gitWeBWorKRemoteName = "origin";$gitWeBWorKBranchName = "master";$gitPGRemoteName = "origin";$gitPGBranchName = "master";$gitLibraryRemoteName = "origin";$gitLibraryBranchName = "master";

As we can see there is an option to turn the Upgrade Notifier on and off, as well as options to set the remote and branch for WeBWorK, PG, and the OPL.  Most people will use this default setup.  For the above server we have changed the branch for PG and WeBWorK to develop but left the remote as origin (because that currently points to openwebwork).  If we wanted to we could even have the update notifier point at our own personal repository or at some feature branch we care about.  We haven't changed the library branch or remote, and usually you won't.  Of course if you want to use this feature you will need to copy these lines over to localOverrides.conf

Note:  If you are working with a fresh installation or upgrade, you should also make sure that the external program git is defined in the site.conf file by the line $externalPrograms{git} = "/usr/bin/git"; Once your repository information is configured, whenever you visit the Course Administration page your server will use git and ls-remote to check and see if the configured remote and branch has commits which are not in your currently selected local branch. If you are using the default setup of pointing to origin and master then you will only see an upgrade message for PG or WeBWorK when there are important bugfixes or a new version. If you point to a different branch, like develop, you will see upgrade messages more often. (Usually you will want to select a local branch which tracks the configured remote and branch. However, you can have additional commits and customization in your local branch without affecting the upgrade notifier.) The OPL gets updated frequently so you are likely to see upgrade messages for that component frequently, even on the master branch. If you would like to disable notifications for any portion of the system, just set the remote name and branch name for that component's variables to be empty strings. Note: The upgrade notifier will also let you know when there is a new version of WeBWorK available. This is mostly important for people using the default setup. Upgrades to the master branch of WeBWorK or PG will always be pretty safe. However if you see the new version message then the upgrade process will likely be a lot more involved. However, it will be worth it because you will also get all of the new features that come with a new release. Our releases are biannual so you should only see this message twice a year. When there are upgrades available you can download them by using the following command as necessary in /opt/webwork/webwork2 or /opt/webwork/pg or /opt/webwork/libraries/webwork-open-problem-library git pull <remote name> <branch name> If you are using the default setup then this command should be pretty safe, unless there is a new WeBWorK version. Since the above server is tracking develop there could be any number of changes waiting upstream and we may have additional configuration or conflict fixing to do. In any case, after updating all three components on our server we get a message which looks like this Everything is up to date, but we forgot to run OPL-update. After doing so we refresh the page and get the message. Finally even system administrators get to experience the thrill of seeing the green bar. ## July 31, 2014 ### Geoff Goehle #### Customizing Colors This post will address a relatively superficial, but often requested, feature which has been recently added to the develop version of WeBWorK - customizing theme colors and logos. This latest change adds a couple of color variations for math4 right out of the box, as well as a built in way for system administrators to customize math4 themselves. The first thing you will notice if you download the latest version of develop is that there are a couple of new themes available in the Course Config page - math4-green and math4-red. Selecting either of these new themes will give you this: You should notice that these variants are basically the same as math4 with different colors. This is because they are implemented in such a way that they are just additional color css layered on top of math4. So in theory they will always be up to date with the latest math4. Of course, if you give a man three colors he is going to want 256. That is why this update also allows sysadmins to customize math4. The key to this customization are the files webwork2/htdocs/themes/math4/math4-overrides.css webwork2/htdocs/themes/math4/math4-overrides.js These files are not shipped by default (although they have .dist versions) and are not tracked by git, so they won't be overwritten when you update. However, if you put either of these files into the math4 theme folder they will be included into all WeBWorK pages after the normal math4 css and javascript. This means that you can use them to make changes to math4 without potentially breaking your upgrade process. Lets go through an example where we will change math4 to use the Western Carolina University colors and logo. First we copy over the distribution versions of the override files to give us something to start with cd /opt/webwork/webwork2/htdocs/themes/math4/ cp math4-overrides.css.dist math4-overrides.css cp math4-overrides.js.dist math4-overrides.js We start with the coloring. The math4-overrides.css file automatically simplifies the coloring of math4 so that there are only a handful of colors that are used over and over. They are: • Dark Blue: #003388 • Light Blue: #0088CC • Dark Green: #519951 • Light Green: #88FF88 • Dark Red: #FF9494 • Light Red: #CC7676 • Dark Yellow: #BDB45E • Light Yellow: #EDE275 Because we are using css (and not less) we have to change these by using a global find replace on the hex value, but that isn't so difficult. The Dark Blue and Light Blue are the primary theme colors and are used almost everywhere. The Green, Red, and Yellow colors are mostly used for alerts, such as marking things correct or incorrect. We will be conservative and just change the main colors. We would like to use WCU's school colors • Purple: #492C88 • Gold: #CD7F32 I'm going to replace the Dark Blue by Purple and the Light Blue by Gold. We could do this using any text editor and a global find/replace but lets get fancy sed -i 's/003388/492C88/g' math4-overrides.css sed -i 's/0088CC/CD7F32/g' math4-overrides.css This by itself gets us much of the way there We could spend a lot more time tweaking the colors. For example, something that is missing by default (for ease of initial configuration) are hover colors for the buttons. Adding a slightly different hover color will make the buttons seem much more dynamic. However, we will leave the colors as they are and address another often requested feature: changing the logos. This is not done via css, rather it is done by javascript. If we open math4-overrides.js we see the line /* This changes the MAA Logo on the top to a new image */ //$('.maa_logo a img').attr('src','new-path-here');
There is a similar line for the WeBWorK logo.  So if we want to put our school logo in place of the MAA logo we could put the appropriate image file (wcu.jpg) into webwork2/htdocs/images and change our js line to
$('.maa_logo a img').attr('src','/webwork2_files/images/wcu.jpg').css('height','40px'); Remember that things in htdocs will be available on the web under the webwork2_files directory. This gives us the following And that is it. If we wanted to we could also replace the WeBWorK logo in much the same way. So after only a few commands we have been able to give WeBWorK a whole new look. We could go farther, too; much farther. The thing to remember is that the override files allow system administrators to execute arbitrary css and (jQuery) javascript code that will be run after the usual math4 code. The javascript/css combination is extremely powerful and allows you to change pretty much anything, including html content. So for example if I wanted to change "Hmwk Sets Editor2" to "HW Sets Editor" in the Instructor Tools navigation menu I could just add the following to math4-overrides.js$('#site-links a:contains("Hmwk Sets Editor2")').html('HW Sets Editor');
Of course, you have to come up with the javascript yourself, but the sky really is the limit here.  You can add whole features this way, all without touching core WeBWorK code.  (Although if you do that you might as well just write it into the core code and submit it as a pull request!)  There are a few gotchas to keep in mind, but in general this should provide power administrators with a great deal of flexibility.

Gotchas:
• Remember that unless you delete math4-red and math4-green your instructors will still be able to manually change to those themes.  Any overrides that you put into htdocs/themes/math4/math4-overrides.js or the corresponding css file will not automatically make it into math4-red or math4-green.  You will need to link to the math4-override files in the math4-red/math4-green subdirectories in order for your changes to carry over.  Of course if you copy over math4-overrides.css then math4-red and math4-green won't be red/green anymore.
• While your modifications in the override files will not be overwritten by an upgrade, and should generally just work, it is possible for WeBWorK updates to change math4 in such a way as to be incompatible with your override files.  If this happens you will have to merge your changes with the new math4-overrides distribution files.
• By default using this file removes some of the "dynamic" elements of bootstrap, like grading on the buttons, or a slightly different highlight color on the buttons. This is done for ease of configuration.  If you look at  htdocs/js/vendor/bootstrap/css/bootstrap.css you can copy/modify the relevant css code to get fancier buttons working again.  However this all has to be done "manually" and can't be automated with a global find/replace.
• Some of the red/green coloring is done using inline styling via pg.  This means that it can't be overridden using the math4-overrides.css file.  If you really want to alter all of the correct/incorrect coloring you will need to use javascript and math4-overrides.js to do it.

## June 20, 2014

### Geoff Goehle

#### Release 2.9 Changes

We are happy to announce that the latest version of WeBWorK, 2.9, has been released.  This is a smaller release than 2.8, as evidenced by the fact that there are no database or module additions. The primary changes to WeBWorK for this release are: support for Apache version 2.4 (and hence the latest versions of Ubuntu and Fedora), polishing the math4 interface, adding a couple of new PG modules, and general bug fixing.  A full list of changes is below.

### Supported Distributions and Depreciation

The following are the distributions that are officially supported. You still can use WeBWorK on whatever you like, of course. In particular if you install WeBWorK on a very recent version of Ubuntu or Fedora and have problems let us know.
• Ubuntu LTS 14.04
• Debian 7
• Centos 6
• Fedora 20
We also want to support RedHat 6 but can't reliably test on it because the distribution is not freely available. If you install on RedHat 6 and run into trouble let us know as well. We are also removing or depreciating support for some things that have been replaced by newer components.
• RedHat 5 is no longer supported because its version of Perl is not new enough.
• The old version of the Homework Sets Editor and the Classlist Editor are no longer shown by default and are no longer maintained. If they are enabled via a configuration file they will still (mostly) work, but are not kept up to date.
• With the increased use of JavaScript, more of our functionality has become dependent on to what were once mostly cosmetic themes. Right now the only two supported themes are math3 and math4, and math3 is only partially supported for the newest of features. Older themes can be found in the unsupported-themes directory.

### Fresh Install

If you want to use version 2.9 with a fresh installation you should take a look at the WeBWorK installer, ww_install.  The installer has been upgraded to support Apache 2.4 and, consequently, newer distros. You can use it by following the instructions on the previous link or here. Note: ww_install also installs the components necessary to switch your installation to the develop branch or even the WeBWorK 3 branch (ww3) without installing new software. (You will need to upgrade your course tables, and run OPL update though.)

If you want to upgrade an existing installation to version 2.9 you can do so very easily assuming you are using git.  For this to work we are assuming that you are using a git based WeBWorK installation with the standard installation locations.  If you aren't using git it might be best to move to a new installation.   To upgrade to the latest version of WeBWorK do the following:
cd /opt/webwork/webwork2

cp htdocs/site_info.txt htdocs/site_info.txt.bak
git pull
cp htdocs/site_info.txt.bak htdocs/site_info.txt
cd /opt/webwork/pg
git pull
sudo apachectl restart
cd /opt/webwork/libraries/webwork-open-problem-library
git pull
/opt/webwork/webwork2/bin/OPL-update
Some things to watch out for when running these commands
• If you don't have standard locations, then alter the paths above.
• If you are not using the master branch you may need to alter the git commands.  More information on using git to upgrade can be found here.
• Depending on your distribution, restarting apache may require a different command
• This works if you are upgrading from 2.8.  If you are upgrading from 2.7 or earlier you may also need to use check_modules and CPAN to install new modules, as well as upgrade your course databases.

### What's new?

• Added support for Apache 2.4
• This includes internal changes to WeBWorK to support Apache 2.4 as well as a new configuration file, webwork-apache2.4-config, which should be used for Apache 2.4
• Remember that you also need to use the new Apache 2.4 directives when setting up your server: MaxConnectionsPerChild in place of MaxRequestsPerChild, and MaxRequestWorkers in place of MaxClients.
• Removed jsMath. This display method has been entirely superseded by MathJax
• Added maketext calls to places where they are missing. This is the first step for localizing these strings. They now need to be translated.
• Fixed depreciation warnings for Perl >5.16
• Added an unsupported-themes folder and moved everything but math3 and math4 into that folder.
• Newer pages assume things like the presence of jQuery or certain bootstrap elements. These are missing from old themes that haven't been kept up to date. Using these themes will cause unexpected results. You can re-enable them, at your own risk, by moving them from unsupported-themes back to themes.
• Added LaTeX editing support for MathView. This has two uses.
• If you enable MathView and use essay questions then MathView can be used to typeset LaTeX equations in an essay box.

## July 17, 2013

### Michael Gage

#### WeBWorK::Vancouver - June 27 - 30, 2013

Hi again,

Close on the heels of our participation Sage Edu Days comes the code camp at Vancouver.

We had a significant number of first time participants at this code camp:  Alex Jordan and Chris Huges, Portland Community College; Liz Brauer, ECE department at Northern Arizona University, Nandor Sieben, Math Dept at Northern Arizona University; Nora Franzova, Langara College, Vancouver; Aori Nevo, Stevens Institute of Technology, NJ.  One of the purposes of these code camp is to widen the pool of developers who feel comfortable making contributions to the WeBWorK code base.

Additional guests dropped in for part of the code camp: Davor Cubranic, Statistics dept at UBC; John Hsu, Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology at UBC; and Steven Wittens, developer of MathBox.

The remaining participants were Anneke Bart, St. Louis University; Robert Beezer, U. of Puget Sound; Mike Gage, U. of Rochester; David Gage, U. of Waterloo; Djun Kim, Myplanet Digital; Arnie Pizer, U. of Rochester and John Travis, Mississippi College.

Here are a few highlights from the code camp:

• Yoav Freund and Matt Elkerj from UCSD gave a presentation via Skype on using webwork and machine learning to discover patterns in the past_answer log that indicate that a student is floundering and to step in before this occurs with additional scaffolding. They have a video on you tube at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqKaYckjO8 which presents this very well. There is clearly a lot more that can be done but this is a very intriguing start.
• Greg Kraus from NCSU gave a presentation on the accessibility of WeBWorK including both strengths (of which there are many -- especially when using MathJax) and weakness that can be improved. He has an initial document at
• https://docs.google.com/a/ncsu.edu/document/d/1n1aUjAxRqAxxwfUUCf0uAj923f5QokpFu-fYUvJJPcU/ listing specific items that can be fixed in the presentation layer.
• If you would like access to this document (and in particular if you might have time to work on some of the fixes) please write Greg (greg_kraus) at ncsu.edu.
• Aori Nevo has already started preliminary work on this and contributed a few patches to github.
• Alex Jordan and Chris Hughes from Portland Community College report that their IT/accessibility team is delighted with WeBWorK particularly compared to MyMathLab. I've asked them to write a blog post on their findings when they get a chance.
• Steven Wittens gave a marvelous demonstration of MathBox, a mathematics presentation tool built on top of three.js which allows you to "show" not explain. Examples of a similar presentations are at:
• David Gage created a package for Vagrant which allows you to set up a development site for WeBWorK on your own computer in about 5 mouse clicks and in 5 minutes. Watch David's blogpost for more details.
• David Gage and Aori Nevo worked on a prototype white board that allows many students to draw and the drawings are echoed on the instructors board. It's built with web components which simplifies the code. There is a lot of potential here.
• John Travis and Jason Aubrey presented two different ways in which Sage and WeBWorK can interact.
• JT has a number of examples of using sage as an applet (sagelets?). The technology is available in WeBWorK-2.7 (the current master branch)
• Jason has added a macro that will take a program written for Sage (essentially in python) and ship it off to the sage engine to be processed and to return an answer. You might use this to symbolically integrate a function which WeBWorK would not be able to do. (This is available in release/2.8 and develop branches).
• Both of these approaches integrate WeBWorK and the sage cell server being developed by Jason Grout and others. The technology works very well once all the connections are set up. It could still use some work with graceful failure and error reporting when one or the other of the webservices is not connecting properly.
• Alex and Chris also worked on the surprisingly difficult problem of correctly checking factored polynomials in the context of algebra and pre-calculus. It's difficult because one does not want to accept mathematically equivalent answers (e.g. unfactored polynomials) but the exact definition of simplified form is not well defined. (is 2x+1 correct? or 2(x+1/2). How about 2x+2 and 2(x+1)?). They are using Sage as one approach to the answer. It also gave rise to some serious but amusing questions about factoring polynomials over finite fields as possible approaches to the solution. I'm sure the algebra/pre-calculus students will be thrilled.
• Mike and Nandor added code that makes Chromatic.pm much more portable. (Chromatic requires a compiled C program in order to check coloring on graphs.) This should make Nandor's graph theory questions (in the NAU sublibrary) much more widely available.
• Nora was able to convert the entire placement test for Langara College into WeBWorK format.
• Liz was adding to her collection of Electrical engineering problems (in the NAU subsection of the OPL). Thanks to Davide Cervone we are dealing successfully with the use of j as the representative of the square root of minus one. :-)
• There were additional tweaks to the Library Browser, the OPL and also to MathView -- the very recent HTML5 based equation editor which is

Thanks to all who participated in another very successful code camp.  And our particular thanks
to Nora Franzova at Langara College and to Djun Kim from UBC/Myplanet Digital  for making all of the local arrangements.

Those who will be at MathFest in Hartford, Connecticut this August should drop by the WeBWorK
exhibit (part of the MAA exhibit) and say hi to John Travis and any other WeBWorKers who show up.

-- Mike

## July 10, 2013

### John Travis

The two summer PREP workshops associated with WeBWorK have gone well.  The first one dealing with problem authoring is now over but was bursting at the seams and capped out with 42 participants.   The organizers are considering offering the workshop again next summer for folks who missed out this time.

A second workshop geared toward the creation of model courses has held two online meetings and participants are actively working offline in subject area groups.  This workshop will conclude this week with a gathering starting on July 10 at the MAA Carriage House in DC.

Those interested in writing better and more interesting questions may take interest in the course page utilized by the participants during the problem authoring workshop and located at on the test server at MAA.  You may log into this course using the guest login and view much of the material left behind.  In particular:

• the MathObjects presentation slides given by Davide Cervone are located in the set Workshop2.
• many Problem Techniques described by Paul Pearson and Gavin LaRose are located in the sets Workshop3_AM and Workshop4_AM.
• new ways to integrate with Sage are presented by Jason Aubrey and myself in Sage_Applets.
With respect to model courses, groups are actively working on creating and/or refining model courses in High School Math, Beginning Algebra, College Algebra, Calculus and Differential Equations.  The plan is to have functionally complete collections of homework sets for interested users to test out this coming fall and spring.

Further, development is also underway to make implementing these models relatively painless.  Results will be announced in this forum as soon as we know them.  We will be looking for test sites so let any of the organizers (Jason Aubrey, Anneke Bart, Djun Kim or myself) know if you are interested.

Stay tuned...

## July 05, 2013

### Michael Gage

#### Sage Edu Days 5, June 19 - 21, 2013

Thanks very much to the folks at Sage and at UTMOST for inviting us to participate in the Sage Edu Days 5 in Seattle, WA  June 19 - 21.  Jason Aubrey, Mike Gage and John Travis from the WeBWorK team participated.  This is the third year that we have collaborated with Sage to augment the interaction between the two software applications.

As a result we have a new macro file "sage.pl" which simplifies the creation of sagelets -- plugin interacts that augment the power of WeBWorK questions.  In addition Jason Aubrey created AskSage(), a new subroutine which allows WeBWorK to query an instance of sage to have an expression evaluated.  These provide two different mechanisms for  providing high level CAS support to WeBWorK questions by remotely accessing a sage cell server.  The sage cell server has been under development by Jason Grout and the rest of the Sage team over the last three to four years.

The new sage interaction features are available in WeBWorK  release/2.8 which is now "on deck" in the webwork github site:   https://github.com/openwebwork/. Release/2.8 is undergoing final testing and bug squashing before being merged into the "master" branch.   To try it out you will want to use  the branch release/2.8 of both webwork2 and pg.  These are available by simply executing "git fetch" on an up-to-date installation of WeBWorK.  (See Github   and  release/2.7 for details.) While you are at it you should download the new changes to webwork-open-problem-library and run OPL-update to update the library database so as to incorporate the improvements made at the WeBWorK OPL workshop in Charlottesville, VA earlier this month. Preliminary release notes are available at http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Release_notes_for_WeBWorK_2.8

More refinements and many more examples demonstrating the new sage interaction features are expected from the upcoming work at WeBWorK::Vancouver June 27-30  and the PREP13 model course workshop in Washington, DC, July 10-13.

Release/2.7 was incorporated into the "master" branch on June 15, 2013.  The separate 2.7 branch on the openwebwork site will soon be removed.

-- Mike

## July 01, 2013

### John Jones

#### WeBWorK OPL Workshop - Charlottesville, VA - June 2013

This was the first in a series of workshops to improve the organization of the Open Problem Library for WeBWorK.  The standard way to search the OPL is by a taxonomy of mathematics with three levels: Subject, Chapter, and Section.  In the past, problem writers were freely allowed to expand this, and as a result, there are many overlapping parts to the taxonomy.

For the workshop, we selected 3 "Chapters" which included 5000 OPL problems (from single variable, differential calculus).  The participants worked in groups to revise the taxonomy for those chapters, then reclassified the relevant problems into the new taxonomy.

We have also introduced the notion of "level" to WeBWorK problems, and described 6 levels.  Participants classified problems by level as well.  In the development version of WeBWorK, one can now use level as a search criterion (on the Advanced Search part of the Library Browser), and there is an information link located there to describe the different levels.

Next, we went through problems looking for ones which were essentially duplicates, and ones which were very similar.  The criteria is

• given two similar problems, if one cannot make a reasonable pedagogical argument as to why people would want each of the problems (given the existence of the other), then one problem would be flagged for removal.
• if we have a group of two or more problems where different people might want to assign different problems from the group, but they are all very similar, then they were marked as a "more like this group".
Duplicates

Mathematicians are often have very strong views on even minor differences in problems.  The OPL strives to be useful to everyone, but it cannot contain everyone's variation on a specific problem.  There will always be a place for people to make minor modifications to OPL problems to suit their courses.  So, in deciding if two problems are duplicates, we had to use some judgement: if only one in a hundred math teachers would need a particular variation of a problem, we marked one as a duplicate.  If we thought one in ten might want the variation, we kept it (and marked the problems as a more like this group).

When problem A is marked as a duplicate of problem B, problem A is replaced with a special "pointer file".  If someone uses problem A in a homework set, the student gets problem B.  Also, problem A will no longer show up in the library browser.

More Like This

In picking "more like this" groups of problems, we would also pick out a good example from the bunch and marked it as the leader of that group.  In a sufficiently recent version of the library browser, if a "more like this" group is encountered, only the leader is shown.  It is has an "M" in the list of action icons for the problem.  Clicking on the M reveals the other problems from the group (and the M becomes an L).  Clicking on the L hides all but the leader again.  The time to reveal/hide the more-like-this problems is very short, so teachers can easily peek at the problems to see if there are things of interest, but reduce the clutter of problems in general.

Locking the Taxonomy

As mentioned above, in the past the OPL Subject/Chapter/Section taxonomy could be expanded dynamically.  We plan to essentially fix it.  New problems contributed to the OPL will either need to be tagged using the existing taxonomy, or have approval from an OPL editor to expand the taxonomy.  The current version is stored in a file called Taxonomy, which comes with the OPL (it is next to the Textbooks file at the top of the OPL).  It is easy to read/write by both computers and humans.  It also specifies the order the entries will appear in the OPL menus, so they can be in a more logical order (in the past it has been alphabetical).

Participating

We will have several workshops to improve more of the OPL.  If you think you might be interested or have questions, contact Jeff Holt (jeff@virginia.edu) or John Jones (jj@asu.edu).

## June 29, 2013

### Anneke Bart

#### WeBWork, Raleigh, NC, 2013

We just completed a 3-day workshop on WeBWorK. It's interesting to see the directions this is taking.
• We can now assign free response questions. This was more or less introduced last summer if I remember correctly and the feature has been tested by several people. The submitted answers are listed, and each answer can be graded by choosing a grade 0-25-50-75-100 form a drop down menu. One of my colleagues who tried it said it was fast to grade and easy to use.
• Instructors can use "achievements" if they choose to. This will assign "badges" to students if they do certain things. For instance if they work a certain number of problems, do problems before a certain time in the morning, etc. This is part of the so-called game-ification of WeBWorK. I have not tried it yet, but when I asked my students last Fall more than half indicated they might find this kinda fun.
• There are now more problem sets for statistics. Problem sets have been classroom tested at several colleges and universities and are ready to be rolled out. This will be very nice to have as we may expect to be teaching more stats courses due to the increased requirements at the MCAT.
• Related to the previous item is work being done to incorporate the statistics package R into WeBWorK. This is still some time off (months???), but that will help developers create more problems more easily.
Those are some of the big ticket items, but there is a lot going on behind the scenes!

## June 07, 2013

### Geoff Goehle

#### WeBWorK::AnnArbor

Hello everyone.  Another code camp has come and gone and I wanted to write a bit about what I helped out with at Ann Arbor.  My time was, to a large extent, split between three things:  continuing to polish and upgrade the math4 theme, designing the basic objects that will form the core of the next WeBWorK (or WeBWorK::Brewery as it is currently called), and finally prototyping a brand new addition to the achievement system.

With math4, the biggest issue was getting the most frequently used pages of WeBWorK to validate as html5 when in the math4 theme.  This includes all of the pages that students can see, including the login/logout page, grades, achievements, Problem Sets, Problems, the Problem page and the Gateway Quiz page.   These pages should render more consistently across a wider array of devices and if you plug their html into the w3c validator you get a green bar which is not dissimilar to our own green bar.

In addition to working on validation, I also put more twitter bootstrap scaffolding into the system.template file.  This will also help the pages render more consistently and allows us to use the bootstrap "responsive" functionality to make WeBWorK look better on phones.  For example, you can see below that when you use a phone to view WeBWorK the page layout is much more vertical and the side navigation bar is hidden.

One additional tweak worth mentioning is the new "Description" field for sets.  This can be edited on the Set Detail page (the page where you can define the set headers).  If you add a description to the text box and save, then it will appear as a tooltip whenever you hover over the set name on either the main Set List page or the HomeworkSetsEditor2 page.  This means that you can now use shorter set names, which look much better, while also having the ability to present a lengthier description of the set in a way that doesn't take up screen space.

Moving on to the second project, I won't say much here about the results of our database discussion.  That is covered much more thoroughly in David Gage's blog post here and here.  I will mention that the notions of problem pools (a collection of problems from which each student will be assigned a random problem with a random seed) and teams/groups of students are core structures in the new database.  Also the system is intended to be modular enough that (eventually) administrators will be able to choose between several different types of database back-ends when they install WeBWorK.  The general vision is that the database back-end, the WeBWorK code, the PG code, and the web front-end will all be able to function relatively independently of each other and could at some point all be swapped out for alternatives.
The last thing I did was throw together a rough prototype of a new MathPets feature (too rough to show here).  The basic idea is that each student will have a little animated "MathPet" that lives at the bottom of the Problem page (and may eventually travel to other pages).  When they get a problem right or earn an achievement it "feeds" their MathPet and it will grow a little.  On the other hand, if they miss a homework set their pet becomes sad and may get sick.  Every time they earn a level (or at certain levels) their math pet will evolve into a different type of pet (and maybe even into one of several different options).  I think this idea is a lot of fun, but unfortunately it is one of those things which is really sold on the graphics.  While the code for this feature isn't too terrible, my artistic ability is minimal at best.  I will need help if I'm going to realize the full potential of this idea.  So if this feature sounds interesting to you, and you are or know of a good graphics designer that's willing to work on the cheap (i.e. free) be sure to let me know!