Trying to deal with the large number of students switching sections leads me to three questions:
Is there a command line option for assigning sets for individual students?
In the most recent version of WeBWorK, is there a way to set the due date for a group of students at once?
What is the best way to deal with the students switching instructors?
Thanks,
Holly
Hi Holly,
I don't know of any command-line option to assign sets. Someone else may have a better perspective on that. I believe that WeBWorK allows the selection of multiple students and an assignment in the Instructor Tools form, however, which allows editing of set characteristics such as due dates for a group of students.
We've had to deal with the general problem of students adding or dropping courses or switching sections in two cases: the first is in those classes where we have all students (between 600 and 800) in a single class, but with their section number as a distinguishing characteristic, and the second is the case where we have students (between 700 and 1500) in a myriad of smaller classes of about 30 students each. In neither case have a found a particularly portable solution to the problem of add/drops and students changing sections, but the first is an easier problem.
In the first case I've ended up with a fairly simple Perl script that compares the up-to-date roster that I can pull of the University server with the current roster in WeBWorK, and which generates an add, a drop, and a change roster from that. I then use the classlists editor in WeBWorK to add the students (and then assign them all of the sets), drop those that have dropped, etc.
The second case is more complicated because a student who changes course-sections would ideally have her or his work follow her or him from the old course-section to the new one. My work around for the moment is another script that does large-scale WeBWorK course management, including student add/drops and set assignment, using the course rosters I pull down from the University server. It doesn't yet copy/move student work from course to course, however.
I'd be happy to comment further or share code if that's of interest.
Cheers,
Gavin
I don't know of any command-line option to assign sets. Someone else may have a better perspective on that. I believe that WeBWorK allows the selection of multiple students and an assignment in the Instructor Tools form, however, which allows editing of set characteristics such as due dates for a group of students.
We've had to deal with the general problem of students adding or dropping courses or switching sections in two cases: the first is in those classes where we have all students (between 600 and 800) in a single class, but with their section number as a distinguishing characteristic, and the second is the case where we have students (between 700 and 1500) in a myriad of smaller classes of about 30 students each. In neither case have a found a particularly portable solution to the problem of add/drops and students changing sections, but the first is an easier problem.
In the first case I've ended up with a fairly simple Perl script that compares the up-to-date roster that I can pull of the University server with the current roster in WeBWorK, and which generates an add, a drop, and a change roster from that. I then use the classlists editor in WeBWorK to add the students (and then assign them all of the sets), drop those that have dropped, etc.
The second case is more complicated because a student who changes course-sections would ideally have her or his work follow her or him from the old course-section to the new one. My work around for the moment is another script that does large-scale WeBWorK course management, including student add/drops and set assignment, using the course rosters I pull down from the University server. It doesn't yet copy/move student work from course to course, however.
I'd be happy to comment further or share code if that's of interest.
Cheers,
Gavin
yes, please do share code. I've been tasked with implementing something very similar at our site. thanks.
Hi Rex,
The large-scale script I've been using is available on the WeBWorK wiki, in the administration section; there's a page with contributed scripts there: contributed scripts. My script is called wwManage, which does a bunch of stuff including management of course rosters.
I'll put a second script there as well, which is my cl2ww script that creates WeBWorK classlist files from the format I get when I grab rosters from our registrar.
The last script I have is a stand-alone that copies student work. There's one glaring issue with that, which is that it relies on the database structure in WeBWorK being what it expects, and that's likely to change a little bit as WeBWorK evolves and a lot when it goes to database ver. 3. If you want to see that I can post it or send it to you, but I'm hesitant to put it into the general documentation because of its reliance on mysql calls to insert things into the database directly.
Let me know if that doesn't make sense or doesn't help.
Thanks,
Gavin