This semester I’ve got the big organic lecture (close to 200 students) again. Which I am thoroughly enjoying – using iClickers, the document camera, Blackboard, and OWL. This semester we decided to do a test of a different online homework system: WebAssign. The folks at WebAssign graciously agreed to let us do a one-semester trial at no cost, so I have both online homeworks available to the students and at the end of the semester I will be asking their opinion. I already have an opinion myself – and it is mixed! On the one hand, I am very familiar with OWL, and it doesn’t take me terribly long to set it up. The downside is that, due to the commercialization of the system and concerns about student privacy, instructor-level types such as myself no longer have access to some of the behind-the-scenes features that made the administration easy. The worst is the new method for adding in a student after the semester has begun. In the past, the student would send a roster request from inside OWL, it would show up as a message, I would click on the “add student” link, and that was it. Now, I have to add the student’s information to my roster spreadsheet and re-upload the spreadsheet, which means reminding OWL that this is a tab-delimited file, copying columns if necessary, adding headers to all the columns, and confirming that yes, this is really what I want to do. It takes a LOT longer. I understand the privacy concerns, but hey, these are my students, and I have all their information in my roster anyhow, so why can’t I just click on the link and go? I’m sure that the OWL administrative folks have very good reasons for this, but it is still annoying. And they know that I feel that way, so this isn’t news at all; and I certainly don’t hold a grudge, just am continually annoyed every time I have to add a student. Oh well.
On the other hand, WebAssign, while it does use questions specifically from our textbook (but adds in variables, similar to OWL, so that students don’t always see the same question; this is one of the beauties of an online homework system IMHO) is more difficult to set up. When the section was created, I had to put an end date on it. Silly me, I put the last day of classes, not realizing that all assignments would have to have a due date earlier than that. And it defaulted to 12:00 AM, which is really midnight the night before. And what I really want is for students to be able to access the problems until the final, which is a few days later. The WebAssign help system says that I can change that date, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how. Sigh.
I’m waiting for the end of the semester to run any student reports, so don’t have a sense yet of how the two systems compare from that perspective. I have already gotten some student feedback, and (like my own opinions), it is mixed. We’ll see what the overall opinion is next month, I guess.
