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Upgrading from Webwork 2.15 to 2.19 and Searching for Course-Wide Sets

Upgrading from Webwork 2.15 to 2.19 and Searching for Course-Wide Sets

by Jason Terry -
Number of replies: 2

My university is planning to upgrade from Webwork 2.15 to 2.19 by just installing 2.19 from scratch (as suggested by Alex Jordan). We will need to archive and import the courses that are currently being run in 2.15. I've heard this is a course update routine and I'm sure there are other pitfalls we must be ready for. Can anyone highlight and/or point me to the issues we must tackle in making such a big jump from 2.15 to 2.19? I will point them out to our tech admin team.

We also intend to update some of the course sets themselves to take advantage of the new features. When we look at problems in the Library Browser, is there a way to discriminate against problems written in the old versions of PG? We would like to take advantage of problems written in the latest PGML style.

Similar to the last question, we may also create new webwork courses for our courses in college algebra (and lab), college algebra for non-STEM, trig, precalc, and business calc. In addition to problems/sets in the newest style, we will also be interested in problems that take heavy advantage of the just-in-time sets, scaffolding, hints, etc. In other words, my coworkers are interested in sets that can help remediate students that need extra help or that utilize the emporium style. I would like to know if there is a good way to look at entire webwork course sets that different schools use so that I can see all the sets and problems so that we can determine if the features used would be a good fit for our school.

And if there are any other tips I should know about concerning all these topics, feel free to let me know. Thanks.

In reply to Jason Terry

Re: Upgrading from Webwork 2.15 to 2.19 and Searching for Course-Wide Sets

by Alex Jordan -

Everything I say here comes with the caveat that I haven't seen firsthand an upgrade from 2.15 courses to 2.19 courses. But I expect that what you can do is:

  1. Use the admin course interface on your 2.15 installation to archive all courses. Except don't archive the admin course, if that is even an option.
  2. From the server side, get all the resulting .tgz files. For a standard installation of 2.15, these will be in /opt/webwork/courses/.
  3. Get the 2.19 installation up and running.
  4. Place those course archive files in /opt/webwork/courses/admin/archives/. The name of the admin course might not be "admin", and that file path needs to be adjusted. When you are setting up the 2.19 installation, you should make note of the name you choose for the admin course.
  5. In the 2.19 admin course, unarchive the courses.
  6. The admin course has a tool for upgrading courses. Use that tool. It will scan all the courses and find places where the database and folder structures are bad. Click what needs clicking to update them all. There will be a checkbox to also remove unused database columns from the courses, and personally I would check that box too before confirming the upgrade.
These steps use the admin course interface as much as possible, but also some of this could be done from the command line using tools in /opt/webwork/webwork2/bin/. If you'd rather do things that way, let us know.

One would hope everything just works at that point. But you may have issues like a course has some local macros in its macros/ folder that won't work with 2.19. Or similar with local pg files.


In reply to Alex Jordan

Re: Upgrading from Webwork 2.15 to 2.19 and Searching for Course-Wide Sets

by Jason Terry -

Thanks for the tips! I'll let our tech team know. Hopefully it saves us some time.

It just dawned on me that the searching question should be categorized in another forum. I'll repost it elsewhere if this isn't the right location.