Features & Development

Automatic Course Generation and Classlist placement

Automatic Course Generation and Classlist placement

by Mark Hamrick -
Number of replies: 1
I have developed a system to deal with some of the multiple Webwork server issues that we have been facing. Two issues are remaining.

Is there a way to command line generate courses, or an API to do so? I would like to be able to create the course and have all the users placed into the course.

Is there an API or command line method to add students to the course? If so, how does this deal with a student who changes sections in a large course? Currently I place a classlist in the templates directory, but instructors would prefer automation.
In reply to Mark Hamrick

Re: Automatic Course Generation and Classlist placement

by Jason Aubrey -
Hi Mark,

Hal Sadofsky and Gavin LaRose have contributed some scripts they use for administering their servers. They are on the wiki at

http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Contributed_Admin_Scripts_%28Large_Installations%29

Also, in webwork2/bin are scripts called addcourse and newpassword.

If all of the students in a large math course are in the same webwork course but have different section numbers it would be pretty easy to write a script that changes a student's section number.

Then you could fancy it up from there to do many students, transfers between courses, etc.

The API is essentially defined by the $db methods in DB.pm.

(Ooh - if you wanted to be really fancy, maybe you could write a client to do all of these things using the SOAP web-service, and then it could be done without command line access to the server.)

Jason