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Two LMS courses working with one WeBWorK?

Two LMS courses working with one WeBWorK?

by Alex Jordan -
Number of replies: 5
An instructor has two sections of a course, and each section has its own shell in D2L (our LMS).

The instructor would like to use just one WeBWorK shell for all the students. And use the LTI between D2L and WeBWorK.

As far as single sign-on goes, I think there is no problem here. Am I right? Can the instructor establish links from both shells in D2L to the same WeBWorK course without issue?

What about grade passback? The instructor wants to use course level grade passback, not assignment level, so that simplifies things. But will this work with one WeBWorK shell and more than one LMS shell? Does the WeBWorK shell keep data for communicating to more than one LMS shell? And if so, when it sends grades data to an LMS shell for students not in that LMS shell, will the LMS shell appropriately just ignore that data?
In reply to Alex Jordan

Re: Two LMS courses working with one WeBWorK?

by Sean Fitzpatrick -
Based on experience (we tried this last semester), there is no problem with LTI authentication, but grade passback will not work properly.
(If I understood correctly, every time a student signs in from an LMS, this sets the URL for grade passback in WeBWorK, and if you have sign-ons from two distinct URLs, WeBWorK doesn't know where to send the grades.)

You can either create two WeBWorK courses (you can always create a problem set in one course and export it to the other), or you can transfer the grades manually to your LMS at the end of the semester.

Basically, you have to decide which of these two options will be less work!
In reply to Sean Fitzpatrick

Re: Two LMS courses working with one WeBWorK?

by Alex Jordan -
I thought it might be something like that. Thanks for confirming.

I advised the instructor to either use two WeBWorK shells or combine their D2L shells into one.

In reply to Sean Fitzpatrick

Re: Two LMS courses working with one WeBWorK?

by Danny Glin -
This may actually depend on which LMS you are using. I just took a look at the LTI request from D2L, and the grade passback URL is generic, and not linked to a specific course. There is a separate unique identifier which tells D2L which course and student to submit the grades for (I believe it is lis_result_sourcedid). This info is stored for each student in WeBWorK, so it's possible that this could work with more than one LMS course mapped to one WeBWorK course.
In reply to Danny Glin

Re: Two LMS courses working with one WeBWorK?

by Sean Fitzpatrick -
Ah, OK. I should have specified that our experience was with Moodle, not D2L. So maybe it will work there. But the worst-case scenario is that you have to port the grades at the end of term, which isn't too hard to do.
In reply to Danny Glin

Re: Two LMS courses working with one WeBWorK?

by Jeffrey Adler -
We are using Blackboard, where it is possible to merge several courses into one. Once we've done that, we can connect the merged course to a single WeBWorK course.

We are not using grade passback. However, we probably could, since the merged Blackboard course has a single grade book.