UsingWW: Holly Carley - difficulties with add/drop period

$inactiveTopic$ difficulties with add/drop period

topic started 1/3/2006; 3:08:55 PM
last post 1/18/2006; 1:46:04 PM

$user$ Holly Carley - difficulties with add/drop period $blueArrow$
1/3/2006; 3:08:55 PM (reads: 849, responses: 6)

We are running a single large course (1600 students) with numerous instructors which change every semester. We therefore have someone (me) managing the WeBWorK for every instructor. In order to not overload the system we must break these up into several smaller courses. Then the add/drop period becomes a problem. Is there a way to transfer a single student's records from one course to another? Or is there Is there a way of making it possible for students to do the first assignment without having a login id or password and still recording the fact that they did the assignment? For example, if the first question asked for the student's name and Rutgers ID number, could their work on the first assignment be matched automatically with the rest of their work?

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

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$user$ Gavin LaRose - Re: difficulties with add/drop period $blueArrow$
1/3/2006; 3:21:58 PM (reads: 961, responses: 0)

Hi Holly,

We haven't had this problem yet (all of our big courses using WeBWorK have been in a single WeBWorK course), but will starting this semester (when we start having big courses for which the sections have to be defined as separate WeBWorK courses).

I might be wrong, but I suspect that there is no easy way to deal with the problem. Without having thought about it too much, I expect I'll end up writing a perl script to manually move the records from one table to another in the database.

But it would be great if there were a better (already determined) solution.

Gavin

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$user$ Michael Gage - Re: difficulties with add/drop period $blueArrow$
1/3/2006; 3:49:28 PM (reads: 954, responses: 0)

I think a script, either using wwsh or perhaps a php script that accesses the database directly is probably the best medium term solution. If you get a command line script working to your satisfaction Gavin we could probably add web front end if that seems desirable.

Adding self-registration as an option for courses seems like a good idea to me -- we'll add it to the projects on our grant proposal :-)

Take care,

Mike

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$user$ Sam Hathaway - Re: difficulties with add/drop period $blueArrow$
1/3/2006; 4:33:36 PM (reads: 972, responses: 0)

here's a quick mysqldump(1)/mysql(1) recipe for sql_single courses.

Given:
* the webworkRead and webworkWrite passwords are blank (you can add -p to the mysqldump and mysql commands to specify passwords
* the source course is called "from_course"
* the destination course is called "to_course"
* both courses have the same sets defined
* the user being copied has user id "foo.bar" and doesn't exist in the target course

mysqldump -u webworkRead --no-create-db --no-create-info --where "user_id='foo.bar'" webwork from_course_user from_course_password from_course_permission from_course_key from_course_set_user from_course_problem_user | sed 's/from_course/to_course/g' | mysql -u webworkWrite webwork

You still have to delete the user from the source course later.

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$user$ Holly Carley - Re: difficulties with add/drop period $blueArrow$
1/7/2006; 3:08:29 PM (reads: 945, responses: 0)

After replacing from_course and to_course, and foo.bar I get the error:

mysqldump: Got error: 1044: Access denied for user: 'webworkRead@localhost' to database 'webwork' when selecting the database ERROR 1044: Access denied for user: 'webworkWrite@localhost' to database 'webwork'

As root I shouldn't have access problems.

Holly

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$user$ Sam Hathaway - Re: difficulties with add/drop period $blueArrow$
1/7/2006; 6:45:12 PM (reads: 983, responses: 0)

No, these errors refer to the mysql credentials for webworkRead and webworkWrite... add --p passwordForWebworkRead and -p passwordForWebworkWrite respectively. You can find these passwords in database.conf.

You might want to back up your webwork database before running this code.

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$user$ Holly Carley - Re: difficulties with add/drop period $blueArrow$
1/18/2006; 1:46:04 PM (reads: 922, responses: 0)

My passwords are empty.

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Holly Carley - difficulties with add/drop period

Holly Carley - difficulties with add/drop period