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OpenStax great source of homework problems and SOLUTIONS...Exercises ported to Webwork yet?

OpenStax great source of homework problems and SOLUTIONS...Exercises ported to Webwork yet?

by Christian Seberino -
Number of replies: 4
OpenStax (openstax.org) is a wonderful initiative to provide quality free textbooks to world.
They have excellent homework problems and worked out solutions for many math and science classes.

It seems this would be an excellent source of Webwork problems for teachers.
Has anyone discussed porting to Webwork?  It may be an excellent way to get lots of nice PGML problems into the standard library.

I'm very interested and willing to help if anyone else is also in doing this.

Regards,

Chris
In reply to Christian Seberino

Re: OpenStax great source of homework problems and SOLUTIONS...Exercises ported to Webwork yet?

by Michael Gage -
Hi Chris,

I think this is a good idea.  I think that OpenStax might be interested in hearing about this as well.  We are already mentioned in their calculus books --
see http://cnx.org/contents/i4nRcikn@2.37:BUxRn5Hd@8/Preface  and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

While the OPL has plenty of generic problems that cover everything (or nearly everything ) in those texts we don't always have problems that closely mimic the problems in the three Calculus books they have created. Nor do we have set definition files tailored to those texts which would point to the appropriate generic (or new) problems appropriate for each section. 

And we have even less coverage of the science textbooks homework where WW might still be useful.

I would be glad to help with such a project as well but I don't think I will be able to find the time to organize such a thing soon.  I can facilitate communication with OpenStax if someone would like to work on this.

-- Mike
In reply to Michael Gage

Re: OpenStax great source of homework problems and SOLUTIONS...Exercises ported to Webwork yet?

by Christian Seberino -
Mike

I looked at the solutions to one book and it was in Microsoft Word format.  PDFs are also available or can be generated from the Word docs.

I emailed OpenStax CNX (Not sure how related to OpenStax) and asked them how WebAssign did this.  The person said WebAssign didn't get the exercises in any special format.  

I was really hoping they used Latex.  I don't suppose you have any brilliant suggestions for porting from Word to Latex or PGML including images and equations? ;)

The TEXT could be somewhat easily scraped from the PDFs.  What would be nice is some way to automate the porting of the images and equations if that was possible to avoid introducing errors.

Any suggestions welcomed.

Regards,

cs
In reply to Christian Seberino

Re: OpenStax great source of homework problems and SOLUTIONS...Exercises ported to Webwork yet?

by Christian Seberino -
I can't believe my eyes but apparently there are Word to Latex converters that claim they can even handle equations!!

There is hope!


In reply to Christian Seberino

Re: OpenStax great source of homework problems and SOLUTIONS...Exercises ported to Webwork yet?

by John Brevik -

Hi, everyone,

I'm new here and came across this thread. I'm looking for pretty much this exact thing -- problems taken directly from OpenStax -- for Calculus I and II, and so I'm very interested whether there was any progress made. I'd appreciate any insights or advice.

Thanks!

John