• Our WeBWorK server is webwork.uoregon.edu, so the root webwork page is http://webwork.uoregon.edu/webwork2.
• Courses are titled MathXXX-CRN, so you can find your course that way, and so can your students. The URL to get you to (for example) Math 251 with CRN 123456 would be http://webwork.uoregon.edu/webwork2/Math251-123456.
• Create homework assignment.
• Testing your homework assignments.
• Altering student roster.
• Miscellaneous questions answered.

HOW TO CREATE A HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT

1. Many of you (if for example you are teaching Math 111, 112 or Math 251) will have pre-made homework set templates you could use (or edit).

   To get these templates to show up for your course:

   • log into WeBWorK.
   • Go to "Homework Sets Editor".
   • Click on "Import..." and choose a file ending with .def. (The default is to assign this to no users, which is a good idea until you've made sure it is what you really want).
   • Once you do this, the set should appear. Click on the number under "Edit Problems." This will allow you to edit the date that students can view the problems (I see no point in hiding the homework, so I typically make this a date in the past), the due date, and the date that they can view the answers (if you make this a couple days after the due date, it is easier to give extensions if you want to).
   • You can also delete problems from this page, and most importantly, you can
   • view the problems. Set the "Display Mode" at the top of the problem list to "images" or something, and then click "refresh display." This allows you to read and try problems.
   • If you want to add problems to the assignment, see adding problems below.
   • If you are happy with the assignment as it stands, go to assign homeworks below (the students can't see it until you "assign" it to them).

2. To create a new problem set (not from a department supplied template) you'll need to do Instuctor Tools -> Hmwk Sets Editor -> Create ...

   You can set the due date, the opening date (when students can start answering problems), and the date that corect answers are shown to the students. (You can always change all of these things later.)

   I usually set the opening date in the past since I'm not wanting to hide the problems from the students (also see the step of assigning users), the due date at 11:59pm on the night I want them to be done, and the show answers date to the same thing.

   There is an argument to put the "show answers" date in the future by a couple days in case you want to be able to give individuals extensions.

   NOTE: Don't put a period or underscore in the name of your problem set. If any of your problems contain images, then students will have trouble printing them if there is a period in the name of your problem set. The same caution goes if you write your own problems. They will be in files with the ".pg" extension. Don't put any other periods in the problem name. Similarly, if your problem includes an image, it will be a file ending in ".gif" and you don't want any other periods in that problem name either.

3. Then to put problems into the homework set:

   Library Browser -> Add problems to Target Set (select here)

   then under the "Browse" paragraph the "National Problem Library" should be grayed out since it should be automatically the selection. You can then select Subject, Chapter, Section and click "View Problems". Note that you can select how many problems to view at once, and that WeBWorK needs to compile these problems. If you

   Then click on problems you want to add, and then click on "Update Set"

   You can also do an advanced search, and search by textbook and chapter, which is sometimes useful, though only a few textbooks have many problems entered. (Stewart is one that has a lot of problems entered, but often for the 5th edition.)

   One annoying issue, if you click on a bunch of problems on the first page, and then go to the next page, and then click "update set" it won't add the problems you clicked on on the first page.

   I often do "Max. Shown = All" unless there are many hundreds of problems in the category I've chosen.

4. Assign problem set to users. You need to do this step however you create the problem set. Students won't be able to see the problem set until you assign it to them (which is good, since you don't have to worry about them getting confused by draft problem sets).

   Hmwk Sets Editor -> Click on the numbers under "Edit Assigned Users" in the row corresponding to the homework you want to assign.

   One option on the page that comes up will be the "Assign to All Current Users" which is almost always what you want to do.

   [Note on visible/hidden sets. If you discover a problem with a set you have already assigned to students and you need to hide it from them, you can make that set "hidden" in the "Hmwk Sets Editor" (you'll have to make it visible again once you are ready for students to see it again).

   If you create a set in the "Library Browser", it defaults to hidden. If you create it in the "Hmwk Sets Editor", it defaults to visible (though in both cases the default is not to assign it to any students).]

5. Note on assigning problem sets: attempts to edit problem sets that are not assigned to you can result in strange error messages. Of course nothing will get harmed by this, but you may have trouble editing the problem set.

LOCAL PRE-PACKAGED MATERIAL

There is some pre-made material you can use for various courses. Problems have been written already for Math 106, 111, 112, 241, 242. You can find these by seleting the "Library Browser" and then clicking on "Browse Local Problems" and selecting the appropriate "Local Problems."

Some courses also have sample homework assignments that you may be able to use. These are available for Math 111, 112, 251 as described above under A. of "HOW TO CREATE A HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT.

TESTING YOUR HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENTS

There are several things you should do to test the assignment.

• Make sure the assignment has sensible dates and times. If the opening date isn't in the past, the students won't be able to look at the homework. And if the "answers available" date isn't in the future, they'll be able to get the answers.

  Consider what you want to tell your students about your willingness to answer email in the hours before the due time.

• Make sure problem sets are "visible." If they aren't, the data describing them will be gray instead of black in the Hmwk Sets Editor. You can fix this with the "Make selected sets visible" option on that page.

• Make sure that you can make hardcopy from the homework set painlessly. Your students are going to want to print the homework out, and if they can't they'll be frustrated. Do Homewok Sets -> Download hardcopy for selected sets to check this. If you have problems you can't resolve, ask for help on this - it is important to your students.

  Note you can test the printability of all your homeworks at once by Homewok Sets -> Download hardcopy for selected sets then select all your sets, and click the "generate hardcopy" button.

• Finally, and most importantly, do the problem set. It will help you find any mistake, and it is the only way to be in a good position to help your students. It also gives you a chance to find errors and either fix them, or get one of us to fix them, before your students find them.
• Make sure the assignment is assigned to all students in WeBWorK once it is genuinely ready. You really don't want to assign it until you are confident because it can be inconvenient to make changes after your students have started working. At the same time, if you discover a problem that is bad after the set has been assigned, see marking a problem correct.

  Once the problem set is created, if you go to Hmwk Sets Editor and click on the number under "Edit Assigned Users" you can then assign to all users.

HOW TO ADD YOUR ROSTER

The other task that requires some initial work is populating the course with students. We are creating rosters and moving them to the webwork directories for individual courses in the office, but there is still one step that you'll have to do:

• Log into WeBWorK for your course. For the sake of the example, assume your course is Math 111, CRN 23456.
• Go to Instructor Tools -> Classlist Editor.
• Click on "Import users from file Math111-23456.lst replacing no users and adding any new users."
• Click on "Take Action."

1. Download html-classlist-duckid to your desktop. This is the script that converts the roster from DuckWeb into the format that WeBWorK expects.
2. go to DuckWeb and get your class list, then click the "download class list to excel" link.

   You don't actually want this to open in Excel, you just want to save it to the desktop. Also, what you get is not actually an Excel spreadsheet. It is simply a text file (in some version of html) that Excel knows how to translate into a spreadsheet. We're not going to use Excel though.

3. On a Mac, open Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal. and then in the terminal (assuming you've downloaded the html-classlist-duckid and your roster both to your desktop) type the commands

   cd Desktop (and then hit return)
   perl html-classlist-duckid hwskclst.P_ClassList (and then hit return)
   

   (If you are using any other kind of unix desktop other than a Mac, this will also work, but you probably will already know how to get some kind of terminal window. If you have the misfortune to be using MS Windows, you are kind of on your own here, but I'm sure _something_ works in that situation as well.)

   Also note that the file hwskclst.P_Classlist is the roster you downloaded, but if you download it more than once without deleting the previous version then the second copy will be named hwskclst_1.P_Classlist or something like that. Etc.

4. The output file will be of the form CRN.lst (those last three letters are lower-case LST not 1ST, and where I typed CRN will be the actual CRN for the course).
5. Now, log into the WeBWorK class
6. Click on Instructor Tools -> File Manager
7. "Browse" to the CRN.lst file and click "Upload" once you've selected the file.
8. Click on Instructor Tools -> Classlist Editor and "Import" users from the file you just uploaded.
9. You can repeat as students add and it will add new students without duplicating students who are already there. However WeBWorK won't remove students who aren't on the roster. If you want to do that, you have to do it by hand (see below).
10. Each student's login will be their regular UO email login credentials.

• NOTE: You can add individual students (or delete students) by hand. To add: Instructor Tools -> Classlist Editor -> Add n student(s) -> Take Action. You should use their "DuckID" (the part of their UO email address before the "@" sign) for the login name, and their student id number for the "Student ID"

  To delete students (careful - this deletes all their homework scores of course) Instructor Tools -> Classlist Editor then select the student you want to delete and click on the "Delete" radio button and then "Take Action."

• NOTE: when you add new students, make sure to assign the problem sets to them. Clicking on "assign to all students" under Instructor Tools -> Hmwk Sets Editor -> Edit Assigned Users for the homework set you are assigning.

INTRODUCING STUDENTS TO WeBWorK

• There are serious advantages to using WeBWorK, and I take pains to point these out to students.
  1. They get instant feedback on problems, and thus can make corrections if they have made mistakes, and can do it when they are still thinking about the problem.
  2. They get a good email structure for asking for help from their instructor on individual problems (this will only work if you make some effort to periodically answer the emails).
  3. They get practice at entering mathematics into a computer with correct syntax, which is necessary and useful whenever they will do any sort of complex mathematics on a computer or calculator.
  4. All of their homework is marked, not just the subset that can be done by graders.

  These advantages come with some potential frustration too.

  1. If they have the answer wrong, they will get instant feedback. With paper homework, the student would have been able to believe he or she had the correct answer until he or she didn't care much anymore.
  2. At least for the first couple of weeks, students will tend to assume WeBWorK has an error rather than that they have an error. (Of course they could be right, but they usually aren't).
  3. The email help is great for the students, and useful for you to see what they are having trouble with. But it will frustrate the students if you don't attend to your email from them in some reasonable way. There will be a lot at the beginning of term, less as they learn how to do things better.

     It is probably a good idea to give your students some guidelines about when you are likely to be able to answer emails, especially on the days that homeworks are due.

  4. They will be very frustrated by the syntactical problems they run into. For example, WeBWorK will not accept 1/x+3 if the answer is really 1/(x+3). This is a good thing, but the students may not see it that way.

     It is worth reminding them how useful the "Preview Answer" button is in terms of figuring out if they have really entered what they meant to enter.

• Like any such program, WeBWorK is sensitive to correct parenthesization (and other syntax issues), which our students often have trouble with. The students should understand that the use of the "Preview Answer" button (which tells them what WeBWorK thinks their answer is) and of the "Check Answer" button (which tells them if their answer is correct) cost. them nothing and are often helpful when they are having trouble.

  WeBWorK doesn't record their answer as an answer until they click "Submit Answer." They can change their answer if their answer was wrong after "Submit Answer" (unless they've used up all the alloted tries).

• Consider giving your students a problem set (even if you don't count it) that just has them interacting with WeBWorK so they learn how to enter numbers, arithmetic expressions, etc. Do this immediately (due, for example the third day of class).

  There are some pre-designed ones, which you can "Import" under "Homework Sets Editor." The ones that have names like set0.def, setDemo.def, setMAAtutorial.def, setOrientation.def are all orientation homework sets. (In fact, if you've never done WeBWorK, it is useful to do a few of these to see how things work.)

• For most of the problems I choose, I see no disadvantage to allowing infinitely many tries on the problems. I make this clear to my students so that they don't worry needlessly about clicking on the "Submit Answer" button before they are 100% certain.

  The default maximum number of attempts is usually unlimited. But it can be coded into the problem. It can be set on a per-problem basis under Instructor Tools -> Hmwk Sets Editor ->whichever problem set.

• I've made it a practice to tell the students I will round all homework scores of 90% and above up to 100%. This reduces student anxiety about being penalized about WeBWorK "making a mistake" (though I highly recommend testing the homework so that there shouldn't be many mistakes).

  Of course reducing their anxiety helps them feel better about the course, do better in the course, and complain less to you. I can't stress this strongly enough. You want to do everything possible to encourage, or even coerce students in working hard on their homework assignments while simultaneously doing everything possible to reduce their anxiety about the assignments - especially in the first weeks when WeBWorK is new to them.

MISCELLANEOUS:

1. How to give an individual student an extension:

   Go to "Hmwk Sets Editor."

   Click on "Edit Assigned Users" (that will be a number) for that homework.

   Then click on "edit data" for the appropriate user.

2. How to change an individual student's grade on an individual problem:

   Go to "Hmwk Sets Editor"

   Select the set by checking the box next to it, and then click "Edit selected sets" and then "Take Action."

   Then click on the set name under "Edit all data."

   Then click on "Edit individual versions of ..."

   Then click on "Edit data for..."

   Finally, set the "status" to 1 for correct, 0 for incorrect! (I suspect you could use any fraction between 0 and 1 too, but haven't checked that.)

3. How to mark a problem correct for the entire class (you might do this if you discover an error or ambiguity in the problem):

   Go to Hmwk Sets Editor, click on the link to edit problems for the homework, and then click on the "Mark Correct" box for the offending problem.

4. How to reset a student's password.

   Inevitably at least one student will mess up their password. To reset the password, log into the course, and go to "Classlist Editor," select the student, and check the "Give new password to selected users" option.

   Then click "Take Action," enter the new password on the page that appears, select "Save Changes" and click "Take Acion" again.

5. How to download grades (as a CSV file):

   go to "Scoring Tools"

   select the sets you want.

   Click on "score selected sets and save to" (you can enter a file name here if you don't like the default one displayed).

   Then the results will be displayed as a CSV file (readable to excel and to OpenOffice, etc.).

   To download the file, click on the link with the file name that is displayed.

6. How to change the name of an already created problem set:

   You can use "create a new set named _____..." from the Hmwk Sets Editor. If that doesn't work:

   • Go to Hmwk Sets Editor and select the set you want to change the name of, and click on the "Export" selected sets option.
   • Now "Import" a single set from the file that the previous set got exported to, giving it the name you want.
7. How to name problem sets.

   To record problem sets, you "export" them from the Homework Sets Editor. When you do that, WeBWorK will create a file name from whatever you named the problem set. The file name will have the form:

   setYOUR_PROBLEM_SET_NAME.def

   So it is nice if you _haven't_ named your problem set something ending with .def or beginning with "set." Something like "Logarithms" or "RelatedRates" seems like a good easy to understand choice.

8. What if students have trouble reading the problems?

   Sometimes they need to change the "Display Option" (usually near the bottom left for them). "images" usually looks best. "jsmath" is a good second choice. Lots of the others work OK.

9. The students can get information on the format of how to enter things from this page listing the functions WeBWorK understands.

   This should be available from a link on the page they see when they click on a homework assignment.

   We've also had sporadic problems with a page that displays units, so if you assign a problem that cares about units, check to see that the link that describes the possible units works, and let me know if it doesn't work so I can try to address it.

10. What if you have two courses and wish to create problem sets in one course and then move them to the other course?

    OK, there is a good way to do this, but it is multi-step.

    • First make your problem sets in one course.
    • Then go to Hmwk Sets Editor -> Export selected sets and select all the sets, and click on take action.
    • Then go to File Manager. You'll be viewing a directory for your course called the "templates" directory. You'll see a bunch of files with names of the form "setYOURHOMEWORKNAME.def". These files describe your homework assignments.
    • Select them all (click on the first one, Command-click on the others). You may also see folders called "setYOURHOMEWORKNAME/". These should contain any header files you've written for specific homeworks (likely you haven't done this) and may contain any problems you've written for specific homeworks (though you could have put them elsewhere in your templates directory). If these directories exist and are non-empty, you probably want to click on them too.
    • After you've selected all the relevant files and folders, click on "Make Archive."
    • This makes a file called MathXXX-CRN.tgz in the templates directory.
    • Select (click on) this, and click on "Download." This downloads it to your local desktop.
    • Now log into the course you wish to copy these homeworks to.
    • go to File Manager in this course, click on "Browse."
    • Browse to the file you just downloaded in the previous steps, and click on "Upload" with the boxes "Unpack archives automatically" and "Delete them" checked.
    • (Almost done) Now to to Hmwk Sets Editor, and use "Import Multiple Sets from" and select all the .def files you want to make into homeworks (oh, and you probably want the "assign to all users" option.
11. What to do if you find a broken problem in the problem library is described here. If you find a broken problem in the Math 111 or Math 112 supplied problem sets, please let Mike Price know.

12. On Choosing Good Problems:

    Think about what homework is for. It is practice so that students can learn skills (it isn't a test of skills they've already learned, though occasionally you may give review problems aimed at testing already learned skills).

    1. For this reason, multiple choice problems are almost always a bad idea on homework (though they can be fine on quizzes or test). Students tend to try to make educated guesses on multiple choice problems rather than to work them out. This is true even if you restrict the number of attempts that they get, except then they tend to both guess and be anxious.

    2. Multiple part problems which are coded so that WeBWorK does not tell the student which parts are right or wrong are typically very frustrating for students (you can only tell this by looking at the code. If there is a line "showPartialCorrectAnswers = 0;" then you are looking at such a problem).

       Multiple choice problems are often coded this way to make them harder to solve by guesswork. I think the additional frustration of not being able to see where there mistakes are erases any possible pedagogical benefit of making it harder to solve the problem by guesswork. Student frustration makes it harder for them to derive the pedagogical benefit from doing the homework.

    3. The best problems in most ways are problems where the answer is a number, a function, or some other algebraic expression which can't be arrived at through guesswork. Then there is no reason to hide partial progress, and usually no reason to limit the number of possible answers.
    4. Of course you want to assign problems that develop the skills you are trying to teach, and you want to know what skills you think the problem you've chosen is likely to develop so you can tell students (if they ask) what the point of the problem is.
    5. There are skills that are difficult to teach through WeBWorK (or through homework in general). Sketching graphs is one such skill. There are good WeBWorK questions you can ask (for example: given a graph of x^2 and a graph of some transformation of x^2, find the transformed function that gives that graph).

       But if I was committed to teaching my students how to sketch a certain kind of curve, I would do it outside of the homework process. I would have students do a worksheet in small groups, in class on Wednesday (say). I would assign some practice problems (not to be graded) for them to do on their own. And I'd tell them I'll give them a brief quiz on Friday. Obviously this is more work, but it is also more likely to give a measurable result.

13. Good sources of information by other authors:
    • The main wiki page for WeBWorK. The "forums" are often good sources of information for dealing with common problems.
    • The Introduction to WeBWorK page at the MAA.
    • A day in the life of an instructor.
    • For writing problems I'd start with the samples and other information listed here and you might also benefit from this page on author training.

Last change: September 2009.