WeBWorK can be integrated into UR Courses in two main ways. These allow UR Courses to create student WeBWorK accounts, and for marking and grading in WeBWorK to be included in UR Courses.

How you would like grades passed through to UR Courses determines how the course is set up.

Course Mode

In course mode a single activity is used. The WeBWorK grade is used for the entire course and is the weighted average over all of the questions that have been assigned to students with WeBWorK. This is useful if you would like to use WeBWorK for a series of homework assignments worth a portion of the final grade, or if you would rather manage grades manually yourself.

Assignment Mode

In assignment mode, each assignment (work or exam) used in WeBWorK is its own activity in the course. Assignment marks are sent separately to the course gradebook. This provides more grading flexibility, but does require more setup.

Course Request

When it is time to request your UR Courses course to be set up for WeBWorK, please contact the Service Desk. Include your department, course, and section(s) in your email, and whether you would like to access WeBWorK in course or assignment mode.

You will receive an email response from the service desk which will include the course name and a shared secret that you will use to configure the WeBWorK activity.

Confirm your WeBWorK login

When you next go to the WeBWorK site, your new course should be visible.

As the instructor, you will always log into the WeBWorK server directly. Students in your course only access the WeBWorK activities through UR Courses. You may use a demo student in your course to test the links and functionality.

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You are now able to create a homework set in WeBWorK. A homework set refers to a collection problems for homework, but also for quizzes and exams.

• Log in to your WeBWorK instructor account on the server
• Click on Instructor Tools, then Hmwk Sets Editor
• Click the Create tab
• Give your Hmwk Set a name (do not include spaces in the set's name)
• Click Take Action! to create your set

Once the set is created, you can add problems to it.

• Click Library Browser
• Choose your Hmwk Set from the menu, and click Create a New Set in This Course
• Choose the library of problems you would like to browse. You will probably already by viewing Open Problem Library
• From the menus, you can filter the problems. Choose your Subject, Chapter, and Section.
• Click View Problems to list the problems that match your filter options.

Each problem in the resulting lists has the option to randomize versions of the problem for different students (), edit the problem ( ), try the problem (), or find other, similar problems in the library (M).

Add any problems you like by clicking the Add button.

Other Available Problem Sets

The University of Lethbridge has selected and developed a set of problems for their courses. These problems contain few errors, and use current problem coding styles (MathObjects and PGML). Using this smaller set may be easier than browsing the large collection of problems in the main OPL library. To use this library, click on the Lethbridge button instead of the Open Problem Library button.

Similarly, the Local Problems library contains problems created by many other institutions, not included in the Open Problem Library. These can also be considered if you do not find suitable problems for your course in the other libraries.

Hmwk Set Features

After the problems are selected, you can make changes and assignments with Edit Target Set. You can choose the order of the problems by clicking on the arrows beside the problems, or sliding them to other places in the list. You can edit or attempt the problems on this page in the same way as when browsing the library. If after re-ordering or removing problems you see the numbers are out of order, click Renumber Problems.

On this page you can set the times during which the assignment is available to students, and also the time when the answers will be available and visible to the students. You can allow hints or not, and set a description for the assignment or exam. The activity type is assignment by default, but selecting gateway/quiz will allow for additional options for an exam. If has a different look than an assignment, and you may choose to display all of the questions on a single page.

Once students have been assigned to the set, this page can be used to edit individual version of the problem set, allowing changes including the start and stop times, per student, for situations like student accommodations.

When you are happy with your options, click Save Changes.

Adding Students to the Hmwk Set

Initially, you are the only person assigned to the Hmwk Set. On the sets editor page, clicking on the number of assigned users will present you with the list of possible users. From here you are able to assign the set to students by checking the box beside each of their names. Or click on Assign All Current Users if you would like to add of the students in the course. Click Save when you have finished. No students will be listed yet, since no students have accessed the course.

The simplest way to add students to your Hmwk Set is to add an activity with your UR Courses course site. In your course's menu, choose LTI External tools from the More menu. You will see a list of external tools that are available in your course. Click Add tool above the list. Give your WeBWorK activity a name, and use the URL of your course on the WeBWorK server. The shared secret that you received when the course was set up goes in the Shared secret field. It can be helpful to make the Default launch container a new window, so that students can easily refer to both the course site and the activity by switching between them. In the Privacy section, choose to Share launcher's name with the tool and Share launcher's email with the tool. These will be used to create the students' accounts in WeBWorK. Choose Accept grades from the tool if you would like to be able to pass grades back into your course from WeBWorK. You can choose to download grades from WeBWorK too, if you would rather.

When a student clicks the course link to the Hmwk Set, an account is created for the student in WeBWorK and a new tab will open displaying the WeBWorK course. Students are added automatically to all existing homework sets, but will need to be added to all future homework sets.

Deleting a Hmwk Set

From within the Hmwk Sets Editor, click on Delete. Select your Hmwk Set, choose selected sets, and click Take Action!

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A Gateway/quiz assignment type has other options that include proctored exams, randomizing the order in which problems are presented, and allowing students to attempt the exam more than once. For example, if the exam should close promptly on time and only allow a single attempt, the Gateway Parameters would be something like:

• Test Time Limit: 0 (set in minutes, 0 means the Close Date)
• Cap Test Time at Set Close Date?: Yes
• Number of Graded Submissions per Test: 1 (0 means infinite attempts)
• Time Interval for New Test Versions: 0 (set in minutes, 0 means infinite)
• Number of Tests per Time Interval: 1 (0 means infinite)
• Order Problems Randomly: No (Though you may wish to do this)
• Number of Problems per Page: 0 (0 means the entire set of problems)
• Show Scores on Finished Assignments?: Only after set answer date
• Show Problems on Finished Tests: Only after set answer date

Problem Groups

For Gateway/quiz assignment types, problems can be randomly selected from within a Problem Group for the student exams. This is in addition to the variations that can be built into problems.

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Grades can be passed back to your UR Courses course site. But you can also download grades directly from WeBWorK if you would like.

Click on Scoring Tools, and choose the Hmwk Set for which you would like to see grades. Click Score selected set(s) and save to:, and choose where to save the comma separated values (CSV) file that will be generated. This file, with a name ending in totals.csv, will show marks in the summary column and the percentage in the final column.

For more detailed marks per problem, select the Record Scores for Single Sets option before clicking Score selected set(s) and save to: button. This will create a file with a name ending in scr.csv containing marks for all of the questions and the sum of the marks in the final column, and a file ending in ful.csv which gives data including the number of attempts.

More than one Hmwk Set can be downloaded, and totals.csv gives the totals for each set, and a running total of marks.

It is possible to upload these CSV files to the UR Courses gradebook, but some manual editing would need to be done. It is far easier to pass grades back to UR Courses from WeBWorK.

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More information and help is available in WeBWorK by clicking the Help button. Question mark icons are included in places where contextual help is available. The introduction includes links to more detailed documentation. Further documentation is available here.

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If WeBWorK is of interest, please see section 2.2 of the WeBWork instructor notes for information on how to apply for a course page. If you require a UR Courses class to be set up for WeBWorK, please let us know a minimum of 3 days (5 preferred) before the start of your class.

General instructions for instructors are available on the WeBWorK server

Watching the video Dr. Petry created before reading the instructions may help you understand WebWorK better:

https://youtu.be/6ChukAvSJKw

• This video briefly takes you through the typical steps of using the software and looks at the two ways you can use it in UR Courses.
• Viewing this video may help you decide whether you will benefit from WeBWorK.

A second video at https://youtu.be/jAv-SuuUCMQ illustrates actual examinations using WeBWorK.

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