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John Jones - A few suggestions

John Jones - A few suggestions

by Arnold Pizer -
Number of replies: 0
inactiveTopicA few suggestions topic started 8/29/2003; 5:05:02 PM
last post 9/4/2003; 1:20:10 PM
userJohn Jones - A few suggestions  blueArrow
8/29/2003; 5:05:02 PM (reads: 1329, responses: 6)
We have a lot of new people teaching WeBWorK sections here and as a result, new suggestions coming in. I thought I would bring them up to see if people liked them or had other opinions on them.

 

  • Add one more date for problem sets in addition to open, closed, and answer. It would be the "visible" date. Until then, the set is only listed for professors and TAs (with status as "invisible"), but not for students. After that date, things are as before. It can default to 1/1/2000 so that people who don't use it get the current behavior. It accomodates people who like to build a set, and make adjustments prior to there being any indication to the students that the set is there.

     

  • Along similar lines, we have faculty who build our standard sets with open dates far in the future. They make adjustments, and then change the open/due/answer dates to their real values. With this mode of operation, students who are added to the course always have to have their dates changed. The suggestion is: when changing dates for the whole class, you have a checkbox giving the instructor the option to make this the new default dates (in which case it modifies the set definition file).

     

  • We have blind students taking courses now, and disabled resources wasn't satisfied with how hard/easy it was for them to understand what was on screen. They can get hard copy converted to Braille, but it takes time and the university didn't want to convert different versions for each student. The solution we came up with was to use a fixed seed for all of their problems so that the university can convert just one set (like doing a textbook conversion). I added a checkbox to the screen where you change data for an individual student to give them these special seed values. I don't know if this kind of thing would be of interest to others.

Let me know what people think.

John

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userLars Jensen - Re: A few suggestions  blueArrow
9/2/2003; 3:32:30 AM (reads: 1521, responses: 0)
On the first point, I basically like the idea, but instead of a having to set an visible date, why not simply have an visible button? This allows the professor, at the click of a button, to make a problem set visible/invisible to students.

Lars.

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userMichael Gage - Re: A few suggestions  blueArrow
9/2/2003; 8:13:21 AM (reads: 1540, responses: 0)
In WeBWorK2.0 the class lists and problem sets are formed independently of each other.
You then assign problem sets to users.  If you start by assigning the problem sets
only to instructors and then, once the problems are set and debugged, assign the sets to students, you get much the same affect that John and Lars suggest.

Since the UI of WeBWorK2.0 is still being fine tuned, there is not yet a mechanism for grouping "users" so that you can assign by groups (e.g. recitation sections, or instructors vs. students) rather than by assigning individually.  Currently the choices are individual assignment and assigning to all, but I expect to add more choices once we figure out what is needed.

You can simulate the same thing in WeBWorK 1.9 by having a class list that contains only instructors.  Build problems using the instructor only class list, then later add the students by building sets from the full class lists.  It's a little clunky by it works.

--Mike



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userThomas Hagedorn - Re: A few suggestions  blueArrow
9/3/2003; 8:17:40 AM (reads: 1494, responses: 0)

I would certainly support the first recommendation.   In our implementation, we initially set up the private and public courses as in the Webwork documentation, but few professors are using it as they find the need to build the problem sets in both the public and private courses too
cumbersome.  For those who don't know unix, I wrote a perl script to move the files automatically from the private to the public course, but didn't help matters much.  Based upon our experiences here, people would like to work in one course and be able to make some
problems sets visible/invisible to the students.

-Tom

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userJohn Jones - Re: A few suggestions  blueArrow
9/3/2003; 11:19:06 AM (reads: 1498, responses: 0)
Hi,

I tried to look for how to follow Mike's suggestion with 1.9 (actually 1.8 since I haven't upgraded our main server yet).  I don't see an option on the build problem set page to build a set for a particular class list.  Is my version of that page out of date, it is on another page, or only available on the command line?

John

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userMichael Gage - Re: A few suggestions  blueArrow
9/3/2003; 11:33:50 AM (reads: 1517, responses: 0)
Oops. I think I misspoke about the option in version 1.9. I must have been thinking about the email operation in which you can use different class lists.

--Mike

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userZbigniew Fiedorowicz - Re: A few suggestions  blueArrow
9/4/2003; 1:20:10 PM (reads: 1502, responses: 0)

Just to add my $.02, if you use my Moodle interface to WeBWorK, you can deal with the issue of making WeBWorK assignments visible/invisible from within Moodle.  The latest versions of Moodle have an option to hide/show course activities to students.

Zig

 

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