- Identify a variety of open online homework systems - Describe challenges and their solutions in open homework problem development and deployment - Recognize opportunities for further development of open online homework systems
In this session we will explore open online homework systems and their use in courses. We plan to use real-time polling to assess attendee’s previous experience with online homework systems and concerns in using or developing content for these systems.
Following this, we will describe our current project around implementing an online homework system in sixteen second-year courses across five departments at our institution. The WeBWorK Open Problem Library (OPL), widely used in mathematics, contains 33,000+ math problems, but very few engineering problems [1]. Students at our institution have shown preferences for WeBWorK over learning management system-based options [2].
Building on ~200 existing engineering OPL problems, we have already added another ~670 existing problems to OPL, have ~110 more existing problems to add, plus ~700 newly coded problems which we will add after testing in classes. We have also converted ~230 problems provided by collaborators using other systems. We have established 5 new subject areas/taxonomies, with 2 more to come. By project end, we will increase by nine-fold the total number of OPL engineering problems initially available, bringing WeBWorK to subject areas where it was previously inaccessible. We will discuss challenges in problem development and testing, developer experiences and best practices.
[1] http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/National_Problem_Library. [2] AG d’Entremont, PJ Walls, PA Cripton (2017). Student feedback and problem development for WeBWorK in a second-year mechanical engineering program. Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association Annual Conference (CEEA 2017), Toronto, Canada.
