Harnessing “WebWork” Platform To Engage Students

Abstract

Summary of Teaching & Learning Context In the academic year 2021/22 I have scaled up use of the “WebWork” platform for my mathematics courses. WebWork is an online platform allowing students to try mathematics problems. The system is popular since it allows the instructor to control most details, such as how many times a student can try a problem, how many marks per problem, etc. Full details on this open source platform can be found at: http://www.webwork.maa.org/getwebwork.html This active learning method was targeted at a group of approximately sixty students in their third year of engineering courses. I also used the system for smaller apprenticeship courses. It should be noted that the system can scale to many hundreds if needed. For the academic year 2021/22, I have also used the data collected by the WebWork server to compile usage statistics that I am in the process of preparing for a case study publication on students’ device-usage habits: does choice of web browser influence student scores? This is joint work with Dr F. Hegarty – MSP/Berkeley , CA, USA.