Hi Greg,
Thanks for the suggestion. See the end of this message for more general comments on your idea.
You can pretty easily get pdf output of the entire problem library (or
a large subset of it). We do this at Rochester and put a printout
(which is very thick) in a public area. People borrow it and xerox
portions they are interested in. We also find it useful to make
available pdf versions of the problems assigned in actual courses.
Here's how to do this fairly easily. Dump the whole problem library
into the templates directory of some private course, e.g. "mycourse"
(or make the templates Directory of mycourse a link pointing to the library). In the webworkCourse.ph file for mycourse, make sure your login is listed in
$PG_environment{'PRINT_FILE_NAMES_FOR'} = ['apizer','gage'];
since you will want files names listed in the output.
Now on the build problem set page, select all the sets (or the subset
you are interested in) and build them --- this requires one click. Now
on the page where you get pdf output, select 20 sets at a time and get
the pdf output (professors can get output from multiple sets ---
students can only output one set at a time). The 20 comes from
$max_num_of_ps_downloads_allowed = 20; in Global.pm. If you have a fast
server, you can up this limit. The limit is there so that your browser
doesn't time out if you have a slow server. This is a little tedious,
but you will probably only do it once or twice a year.
Your suggestion that professors do this on a course by course basis
(say one pdf file covering the entire course) and make it publically
avialable is a good one. This is part of a bigger question of how best
to share problems and recommended lists of problems. As a start look at
http://webwork-db.math.rochester.edu/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/
Here you will find individual libraries used at Rochester, ASU, DCDS,
Indiana, and Stony Brook. We are hoping that everyone writing problems
and wishing to make them publically available will establish a
repository at this site --- the ones above have been set up on an
expiremental basis. There may be a lot of over lap in these sets but at
least it's a start on a national library. It might be a good idea to
add collections of set definition files and pdf output from actual
courses so that if you respect how Prof A from University B teaches
subject C, you can look at exactly what they did.
These are the type of questions we want to discuss at the WeBWorK session at MathFest on Friday, August 2 (http://www.maa.org/meetings/mf2_maas.html). Please attend if you can.
Arnie
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