WeBWorK at McGill Math & Stats

Essentials

1. Course setup. To request Webwork for your course, please fill out the request form. You can use the form to request problem sets from a previous semester to be uploaded to your course. Once you receive confirmation from the IT representative that your course page is ready, you will need to do the following.
   • Linking to myCourses. Accounts in Webwork are managed via integration with myCourses. You must create a link to Webwork in myCourses. Within myCourses, go to the Content tab and create a +New Unit. Use Add existing->External Tool Activity and find webwork in the list of LTI links. If you do not see a webwork link, please contact us. The option to link webwork must first be created manually by IT, and sometimes there are errors.
   • Edit link to open in new tab. By default, Webwork opens within the myCourses browser tab. Aside from being awkward, it causes authentication problems. The option to edit the webwork link is hiding in the very helpfully labelled "..." button, within the "Edit" option.
   • Homework sets. The homework sets from the previous semester(s) that you requested should appear in your course. You can find them under "Hmwk Sets Editor". You are free to use these, edit them, or choose your own problems (see Assignments below). If you are using the preloaded homework, be sure to edit the due dates correctly.
2. Login. Students login to webwork by clicking the link you have created in myCourses. The first time a student clicks this link, a webwork account for that student will be created. TAs, and anyone else in your myCourses class list, also login to webwork via this link. Users do not login to Webwork directly. If a student is directed to a Webwork login page after clicking the myCourses link, something has gone wrong. Changing web browser or firewall settings might fix the problem.
3. Assignments.
   1. Use Homework sets editor to create new assignments, or copy old ones. Note that some characters, notably spaces and brackets, cannot be used in the homework set name. Use underscore "_" for space, it will display as a space. It is not possible to rename a homework set; instead, make a copy. (The assignment name is used as a database key, this is why there are restrictions).
   2. Use Library browser to add pre-existing problems to your assignments. There are many problems in the Open Problem Library. You can also check Local Problems, where you might find problems created by a previous McGill instructor of your course.
   3. Use Edit Assigned Users within the Homework Sets Editor to assign homework to the students. When a new student account is created, that student will automatically be assigned all (visible) homework sets. Consequently, you do not need to check for students joining the course late (more precisely, clicking the myCourses link for the first time).
      1. Caution: A homework set that you have created, but not yet assigned to any students, will nevertheless be assigned to any newly created student accounts. Make sure the Open Date is set correctly!
4. Grades. You can extract grades from Webwork in two ways.
   1. The Scoring Tools option within Webwork will allow you to export ("score") any of your assignments to CSV/Excel.
   2. An aggregate grade is also passed from Webwork to myCourses. After you create the link to Webwork, a Grade Item for Webwork will appear in myCourses. This single grade is computed as (sum of student scores on all problems on all assigned sets) / (sum of weights of problems on all assigned sets) * 100. The weight of each problem is by default 1, and the distribution of problems into homework sets is irrelevant. This score is updated approximately every 30 minutes.
5. Optional configuration (recommended). The following configuration steps are recommended, though not essential.
   • Hide the Webwork Grade Item. The Webwork aggregate score passed to myCourses can cause some confusion to students (and generate worried emails to you): when you assign a new homework set, everyone's score will drop since they now have 0 on the new assignment. You can edit the Webwork Grade Item and make it "hidden": you will still see it but students will not. They can still see their grades within Webwork.
   • De-weighting the Intro to Webwork set. If you are using the "Introduction to Webwork/Set 0", you probably do not want it to count in the students' grades. It will count in the aggregate score passed to myCourses, but you can set the Weight of each problem to 0 to make it not count. Or, you can unassign or delete the set after the first few weeks of class.

Advanced topics

1. Manually setting student scores. You can manually set a student's score on any problem. Find the student using Classlist Editor and click the entry in the Assigned Sets column. Click the set you want to edit, and set the Status field to 1 for full credit, or a fractional value for partial credit.
1. Caution: Verify that at the top of the page it says you are editing data for only that student. You can, using a similar page, edit data for all students simultaneously.
2. Omitting a homework from a student's grade. This only applies if you are using the aggregate score passed to myCourses. If you wish to omit a specific homework from one student, you can set the weight of each problem on that assignment to 0. Follow the process for manually setting student scores above, but edit the Weight field to 0.
3. Direct login. Though all users can login via myCourses, you can still login to Webwork directly if you set a password for yourself. Do this within Webwork via the User Settings. Your login name should be your McGill ID. I do not recommend advertising this feature to students as it will undoubtedly create confusion (and therefore emails).
4. Editing problems. Making minor edits to the text or functional code of a problem is easy. For library problems, Webwork will force you to make a copy of the problem first: use the NewVersion button, and save the file at the path suggested (or anywhere else you wish). Some tips:
   1. Look for BEGIN_TEXT or BEGIN_PGML to find the text of the problem.
   2. Anything starting with $ is a variable (the progamming language is Perl).
   3. Anything within the "\( \)" delimiters is Latex code, and will display as you expect.
5. Writing your own problems. This takes some learning. Check out the Webwork Authors wiki, and the excellent Webwork Authoring Tutorial by Paul Pearson to get started. If you do write some new problems, you can let me (Jeremy) know about them and I can make them accessible to future instructors.

Troubleshooting

1. Loign via myCourses works, but Webwork prompts for login on every page navigation. Try editing the myCourses link so that Webwork opens in a new tab.
2. Student cannot submit submit answers, they can only "Preview".
   • This will happen if the student tries to submit after the due date.
   • This will happen if the student's account status is "guest" rather than "student". You can change this via the Classlist Editor. Account status in Webwork is taken from account status in myCourses: if you have added a student to your myCourses site manually as "guest", their webwork account will also have "guest" status.
3. Student has sent a help message from within Webwork, but I can't open the link. If you are alredy logged into Webwork, the link should work. If not, it will bring you to the Webwork login page. Follow the Direct login instructions above to set a Webwork password for yourself: you can then use this to login via the Webwork login page when prompted.