Insructor Tasks

The document A day in the life of a Webwork Professor available at Rochester Webwork contains most of the information you need. I've included a bit of the details below for things I have found for our system at Washington University.

Do as much as you want

You can take control of the course as much or as little as you want. There are things that might be intimidating at first that I am happy to do (such as shell access and construction of problem sets).

There are also some things that you will want to take care of yourself (such as being able to access student information).

In any case, you should be somewhat aware of what goes on "behind the scenes."

Working From the Web

The majority of your work can be done from the web. Among the options on the "Professor's Page" are the following:

View statistical data on problem sets
View students progress on problem sets
Build problem sets
Send Email to Students
Scoring procedures
Add Student(s)
Edit classlist database
Examine or modify data for an individual student
Examine or modify data for all students
Download paper copies for some or all students
Delete problem set(s)
Housekeeping utilities

Working From the Shell

I am comfortable working with a Unix shell, but that doesn't mean everyone is. Unfortunately, there are a handful of tasks that seem to require using a Unix shell and perhaps the most obvious one is building problem sets.

But, if you are not going to build your own problem sets (and I assume you will not be doing this), then you should be able to get by without any shell access at all.

As a Webwork instructor, you should have shell access to the webwork server: webwork.wustl.edu. To access the server, you will need to know your login and password. (should be the same login that you have for dax). To login, you will need a ssh implementation (such as PuTTY).

To use the shell, you will need to know the name of your course (which should be on the URL when your course is accessed over the web). In addition, you will need to know a few directories:

Your course directory:

/usr/local/webwork/courses/your_course_name_here/

Your problem set directory:

/usr/local/webwork/courses/your_course_name_here/templates/

The bank of existing problems are here:
```
/usr/local/webwork/templates
```

Building Problem Sets - Easy Method

There are several choices here:

Use the existing bank of WeBWorK problems.
(This method is the least amount of work for me and has the least potential for errors.)
1. Go to the problem bank:
  (http://www.math.wustl.edu/~blake/wwdocs/sets/) and pick out some problems to use: You don't have to pick problems that are exactly how you want them, just close.
2. Tell me which problems you picked and how you might want them modified.
3. Sit back and relax. I will get the problem set up and running.
Look in your book and pick out problems to use.
Just tell me which problems you want coded in to WeBWork and I will code them in. (I will probably then look in the problem bank to find a similar problem to use as a template and then modify that problem.)
Write a problem out by hand and give it to me and I will code it in.

Building Problem Sets - More Difficult Method

Scoring Problem Sets

This is an option on the professor's page and I believe this is best done at the end of the course. We can disuss this if you are interested.

Editing Class Rolls

This can be done on the professor page in Webwork.

Answering Email

Email is a very important part of WeBWorK -- student's emails should be answered in a quick and timely manner.