Hi Mike, I have a WeBWork account at the MAA, am part of the wiki and get announcements/etc, and used WeBWork in one of my courses this past fall. I think that WeBWork is great as an online homework system and you have done a great job of designing it to be such. And as such having a large problem library associated to textbooks is a great thing and the ability to make small tweaks to problems is good enough for lots and lots of people.
However, I don't need an online homework system. I am at a small school and so don't have the challenges that online homework solves for larger institutions. My dream system is one that I would use for what is often called "just-in-time teaching." The idea is that I would ask the students some more conceptual questions (I had a nice collection of such questions back when I was at St. Olaf and had access to MapleTA) BEFORE we meet for class (in my opinion most textbook problems are nicely designed for after we meet to reinforce the concepts and I still assign those) and then I use the class statistics to decide how to focus class and I present class using the questions I asked in advance --- also using the fact that the students worked on the questions in advance to create a dialog in class about the problems, rather than lecturing. I tried using WeBWork for this, hoping that even though I could not write my own questions from scratch in a reasonable amount of time, I might find enough problems in the libraries to use. I found tons and tons of what were, effectively, the same problems. I could have written problems that I liked, from scratch, in MapleTA in less time than it took me to cull through all the problem libraries to only find that many of the questions weren't going to work the way I wanted them to. So my dream system needs (1) relatively easy to write the problems from scratch, (2) really easy to have a good projection of the exact problem the students did, (3) easy to indicate/write the feedback you want students to see when they complete a problem (4) really easy to get the statistics for the class. I fear talking about MapleTA too much because I believe strongly that this is not the only program out there that might work well, it just happens to be the one I have experience with, besides WeBWork and a system I happen to know does all 4 of what I need from my "dream system" relatively well. I have not used it in 6 years since I am not at a Maple school. WeBWork could be a good solution, if I could do all for of my dream system items above, but with the exception of getting some statistical information, the other items were too time consuming, or did not work well (for example, it is really tough to project the problems selected for a problem set in a useful way --- it is not designed to do this as it is designed as an online homework system). I also fear knocking WeBWork too much because I think it is great for what it was designed for and I know that these things are hard work and there are great people working on that program (many of them helped me a lot last fall!). I should note that the Moodle quiz system does 1-4 all pretty well, its just that you can't ask math questions for the problem of checking the answers --- which as kcrisman notes is not an easy problem to solve. Again, this is why I think finding the right marriage might be a way to solve the problem. Another is if we could make some changes (may be too difficult) to WeBWork to more easily do my list of 4 dream items. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for your help. I'll look for some of the other information like (Geogebra) that kcrisman mentioned. I appreciate getting this dialog started again. - Amelia On Feb 24, 8:43 am, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: > Forwarding: > > Hi Amelia, > > WeBWorK (see webwork.maa.org ) already has a lot of problems written > for most common math courses, so it's a matter > of searching the library, finding them and choosing them. > Better yet sign up on the wiki (webwork.maa.org/wiki) and inquire on > the forum > to see if someone teaching a similar course will share their > collection of problems with you and then modify those to your liking. > > WebWorK can be hosted by MAA (free trial for a year, low rate > afterwards). > > If you do want to write your own problems WeBWorK is much like LaTeX > in the sense that if you are doing simple problems analogous to > problems already written then the changes needed can pretty easily be > done by non-experts. (see examples > athttp://webwork.maa.org/wiki/SubjectAreaTemplates > orhttp://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Category:Problem_Techniques). On the > other hand, like TeX, if you want to do something crazily new and > wildly different WeBWorK has enough technical power to allow you to > program anything if you are clever enough. > > -- Mike Gage > g...@math.rochester.edu -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-edu@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en.
