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Good Afternoon, my name is Michael Gage. I'm a professor of mathematics at the University
of Rochester in New York state.
David De LaRosa has asked me to say a few words about WeBWorK.
That's an online
homework system - mathematics homework system - that Arnie Pizer and I
started developing about fifteen years ago.
Since then we've been joined by dozens of developers
hundreds of professors and thousands of students
who use WeBWorK in their mathematics classes.
There are two key ideas
that make online homework effective.
The first one is immediate feedback.
The student their answer and immediately the computer tells them whether they're right
or wrong.
The second thing
is that each student gets an individualized version of the problem -
the numbers are somewhat different. The problems are similar but the numbers have been changed
somewhat.
This means that students can collaborate in answering their questions but each of them
still has to answer their own version of the problem, their own question.
I believe that it is this interaction between students as they work on a WeBWorK
question that's probably the most -
the greatest educational advantage of online homework.
Here's how it works.
The computer provides a question. In this case you're supposed to find the derivative
of a function,
and then evaluate it at one,
and then simplify that answer.
The student answers their answers down here.
Here the answers that they entered. And the computer has immediately responded with the
analysis of the answers.
So, it tells you that you missed a closing parentheses - there's a syntax error in the first question.
The second question is correct.
The third one,
well, you didn't put it in the right form. It isn't simplified.
So the student answers the same question again.
This time to get it all right.
There's this green bar which says that all the answers are correct.
Everyone's happy.
Students really love the green bar.
There's a
facebook page dedicated to the green bar - you could look it up.
But WeBWorK is not just about software.
I think our greatest accomplishment is that we've been able to get a lot of people
to use it and a lot of people to help developing it.
There is
a map of the users. We have over three hundred sites that are using WeBWorK now and it's
growing,
slowly spreading beyond the United States.
Here's where most of our - we'd like - we hope that you might join us. Here is where most of our
documentation is.
WeBWorK is now being supported by the M.A.A.
and so our main documentation is at webwork.maa.org.
From there you can get to the documentation wiki,
which
tells you something about WeBWorK,
about the WeBWorK community,
people who support WeBWorK and that are using it,
how to get WeBWorK,
how to set it up,
and documentation on how to use it.
And if you're interested
there are lots of ways in which you too can contribute to the project.
From software,
to
writing questions,
to helping with documentation - perhaps translating documentation. We've recently begun a
localization project which will allow WeBWorK to appear in other languages - other than
English. It was started by Ben Walter in Turkey.
Here's what WeBWorK looks like in Turkish.
At this point it's relatively easy to translate this from Turkish to any other language - Spanish,
French, Russian,
and so forth.
So, enjoy your
discussion today
if you have any questions about webwork
I'd be happy to answer them.
You can write me my email is gage at math dot rochester dot edu.
And here are emails or some other people involved with the project.
Thank you very much.