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Blake Thornton - Add/Drop/update students

Blake Thornton - Add/Drop/update students

by Arnold Pizer -
Number of replies: 0
inactiveTopicAdd/Drop/update students topic started 9/12/2003; 5:08:44 PM
last post 9/15/2003; 4:59:22 PM
userBlake Thornton - Add/Drop/update students  blueArrow
9/12/2003; 5:08:44 PM (reads: 1129, responses: 3)

This is the first semester we have used WW (ver 1.8) and on the first day of class I downloaded the course roll from the university and fed that into WW.  Of course, there have been many students add and drop the class since the first day of class and many of the student email addresses were not contained in the university provided roll.

So, we have been adding students "by hand" over the web which is a bit of a pain.  Not terrible, but not great.  What I find the most annoying though is trying to send the students an email, but this email goes out to all the student who have already dropped the course.

How does everyone else deal with these issues.

I envision periodically downloading a class roll from the university and comparing it to the WW roll data base and updating the WW roll database accordingly (adding the student, marking the student as dropped, updating the student's email address).  Has anyone written such a script?  If not, I will probably try to write my own.  I guess I would need to know how to change the database from the command line (I'm assuming I can probably find the required subroutines in a script somewhere).  Perhaps this is all done by the import_classlist_database script?

Blake

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userZbigniew Fiedorowicz - Re: Add/Drop/update students  blueArrow
9/12/2003; 9:00:06 PM (reads: 1348, responses: 0)

Unless I misunderstand your requirements, most of this functionality is already present in WeBWorK. Namely in the Professor's Page, click on Edit Class Roster, then go to item 6: Import the mathCourse classlist database from a classlist file.  This will bulk add new students into the WeBWorK class, and also optionally drop those who aren't in the list.

So this reduces your problem to writing a script which will convert your rosters into the comma separated classlist format.  You don't even need a script - you can do it with a spreadsheet like Excel.

Zig

 

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userBlake Thornton - Re: Add/Drop/update students  blueArrow
9/12/2003; 11:41:58 PM (reads: 1355, responses: 0)
Zig, thanks for pointing this out. I will give this a try in the next few days and see what it produces. Thanks!

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userArnold K. Pizer - Re: Add/Drop/update students  blueArrow
9/15/2003; 4:59:22 PM (reads: 1322, responses: 0)

Hi Blake,

Using this with WW 1.8 you should be just a little careful.  For example you should not drop or remove yourself from the class and also I strongly recommend just dropping (rather than removing) students who have dropped --- this is the default and recommend thing to do.  If you want to really remove students (there is no need to do this), remove them first via the web interface otherwize you will create zoombies.  You won't do any irreparable damage, but you can create more work for yourself if you are careless.

WW 1.9 has safe guards and/or multiple warnings to prevent/warn you from removing professors, etc. since one or two people got into trouble doing this with earlier versions.

Arnie

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