Below are video guides produced in 2018. A PDF guide to using WeBWorK is available from github.com. This PDF guide was updated in 2015, and may again be updated someday. With both the videos and the PDF guide, the intended audience is Portland Community College faculty, and there may be language/instructions that are specific to PCC. However WeBWorK-using faculty at other institutions may find these materials useful too.
Contents
To Request a course shell for WeBWorK
Send an email to one of the addresses below, depending on your campus. (If PCC supports you, but you are not associated with one of PCC's campuses, you may write to alex.jordan@pcc.edu.)
Use your pcc.edu email address, since these are PCC-managed Google groups, and they may reject mail from non-pcc.edu addresses.
...with the following information. (Note that your G number is no longer needed.)
- What term is the shell for?
(If not associated to any term, say so. But such situations should be rare.) - What course number?
(e.g. MTH 60. If not associated to a specific course number, say so. But such situations should be rare.) You may want to note that we have default homework sets available for MTH 20, 60, 65, 95, 111, and 243. For other courses, we may have something useful as well. - If you have multiple sections of one course, do you want separate WeBWorK shells?
And if you want separate shells, please list all the CRNs. (If not, no need to look up the CRN.) - If you want to manage all the sections through a single WeBWorK shell, then please explicitly say so.
When you manage more than one course through a single shell, you can still manage separate due dates, etc. However you need to learn a little more about the Instructor Tools. Do not manage multiple sections through a single WeBWorK shell if you are using Desire2Learn with multiple D2L shells and you want WeBWorK integration. - Is there an existing course that you would like copied? Like from the previous term? Or last year? Or someone else's course and you have their permission? Please note: copying does not copy the active, assigned homework sets. Nor does it copy any student data. All that it copies is files that are inside the course's templates/ folder. This will include the file that has your Course Info panel information. But if you really want homework sets to be copied, you have two options:
- In the older course, you need to use the Hmwk Sets Editor to "export" the problem sets. This makes .def files that you can see in the course's File Manager. Then when the course is copied, these files will be copied, and you may use the Hmwk Sets Editor in the new course to "import" the problem sets. It is your responsibility to do this before you request a course to be copied, or you need to go on to item 2 here.
- We can copy the course even if you did not export the problem sets into .def files. Then you can enter the old course, make the .def files, download them to your computer, and upload them into the new course. For the downloading step, it is easiest to ctrl-click each of the .def files to highlight them all, and then click to "Make Archive". This creates a single .tgz compressed file that you can download all at once. When you upload the .tgz file into the new course, it will unpack automatically into the various .def files. Then you may use the Hmwk Sets Editor in the new course to "import" the problem sets.
- If you have no prior course to copy, you just want the "default" course shell. It helps to explicitly say so.
3 Comments
Barbra Steinhurst
Hi! Do we now have the capacity to do a set-by-set grade pass-back from WeBWorK to D2L? I see that there's space here for a tutorial video, which makes me hopeful that we've now the capacity. I'm curious for an update.
Alexander Jordan
Hi Barbra, see https://webwork.maa.org/wiki/LTI-Advanced_Grading#Homework_Grade_Mode. You can do this. There are three drawbacks though. 1) You know how right now you have one ELT link in your D2L course? You will have to create multiple of these, one for each problem set. 2) Since each ELT link uses your WW course's URL, then when you go to the next term and copy your D2L shell, you will need to update each ELT link to point to your new WW course. Otherwise students will be sent to last term's WW course. 3) When a student visits WW using one ELT link to one HW assignment, then they are in WW and free to move around. They might go visit some other problem set and get to work on it. You can imagine them being in your Module 1 and clicking an ELT link when they need to get to a Module 2 assignment, and they end up in WW getting there. I am not 100% sure if undesirable things happen in this situation.
I predict that there will be a time when an individual WW set can be put into D2L, in a frame, without the student having the ability to move around inside WW. It is not there right now in WW 2.15. The earliest I think would be WW 2.17, which you won't see until Fall 2021.
That link doesn't make something clear unless you scroll up and read the whole page. You need to put this line into your course config file:
$LTIGradeMode = "homework";
Just put it anywhere on its own line. The course config file is course.conf, and you can find it in the File Manager if you navigate up one level from where the File Manager starts you.
Barbra Steinhurst
Thanks, Alex! I may want to wait until, as you put it, "an individual WW set can be put into D2L, in a frame." This is what I'm doing with my MyOpenMath sets this term to keep the technology as close to single-layered (from the student perspective) as possible. Your point is well made about having to update all of the individual links by hand, and I have considered that wrt the myopenmath sets as well. I'll read up on this, but I suspect that last step of dropping the set right in line with the D2L content is what will benefit the student enough to make the extra work seem worth it to me. I appreciate the update.