OWL is an online homework system created by UMass Amherst some years ago. It originated in the chemistry department, but it isn’t a science-specific system; it is used by art history, physics, economics, and many other disciplines. I was part of an NSF grant to write the database for the organic chemistry homework, so learned a lot about OWL at the time. The idea is that you can write questions that have variables in them; the question pulls the variables from a table that is associated with the question. So you can ask a particular type of question (such as "What is the pH of an 0.25 M solution of HCl?") and have the concentration and the acid (and therefore the correct answer) change every time the question is accessed. This prevents students from deliberately getting the question wrong (since part of the system tells you the correct answer, as well as feedback on how to solve the particular type of question) and then going back and entering the correct answer without actually knowing anything. It can be set up to give students an infinite number of attempts, or you can set a specific number of tries. It can be used as a quiz-delivery tool, even.

UMass Amherst has sold the chemistry OWL databases to one of the big publishers (I forget which one) and it is being used in chemistry classes all over the country, both freshman chem and organic!

We’ve been using Organic OWL for more than five years at UMass Boston. One thing I quickly discovered is that extra credit points have to be associated with anything of this sort, otherwise the students don’t bother using it (even if you tell them that it is of great benefit to them). We essentially proved this by also using the freshman chemistry database but not awarding extra credit points. Very few of the freshman chem students even accessed the OWL system (much less worked through a significant number of the problems) while at least 80% of the organic chem students did at least some of the OWL problems.

We get very positive feedback from the students who have used Organic OWL. They like the fact that they get immediate feedback on the questions; they like that it is web-based, so can be accessed from home, work, or school; they like that they can get a large number of similar questions for extra practice.

I’ve seen a number of different "electronic homework" systems, and OWL is my preferred one. It is easy to set up from the instructor’s perspective (and as they refine the software, it’s getting easier); you can set due dates to match exam dates, or have everything due at the end of the semester, or not set any due dates – basically, it’s very flexible. The scores are downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet, making it easy to integrate with local record-keeping. And, at least from the chemistry perspective, there is a great variety of question types, making it very useful for the students. I highly recommend it! 🙂