Dear Instructor,

In order to continue to improve the WebAssign application while minimizing disturbances to you, we have moved to a more regular release cycle. On the first Tuesday of each month we will release incremental improvements and fixes to WebAssign. We will release any major changes between semesters — typically around the middle of July and the end of December.

You have always been able to email your students from within WebAssign from the Roster or Scores pages. Prior to this release, you had to have an email client application properly set up on your computer in order to send these emails; they went directly from you to your students. If you were using a public computer, you did not have an easy way to send emails from WebAssign to your class, and you could not send emails to large classes. We have improved this feature so it now sends all emails from WebAssign, eliminating the previous requirement for an email client application and allowing you to quickly and easily send emails to over a thousand students all at once.

If you want to send an email message to your class and some of your students do not have an email address on file, you can now send the message to the WebAssign Private Message Inbox for those students without an email address. The Email Students window includes a new option to do this:

If your assignment contains questions that require Flash or JAVA, your students are now alerted if they do not have the required version. A warning message is displayed on the student's Home page indicating the required version of Flash or JAVA. Your students can click a link in the warning message to start installing the required Flash or JAVA version. Your students will not be able to access the assignment until they install the correct version.

Earlier this year, we added the Answer Format Tip feature. An Answer Format Tip is a tooltip that is displayed when your students click in an answer box for certain questions. It indicates the required answer format for certain numerical, fill-in-the-blank, symbolic, and algebraic questions. For example, one question might require a case-sensitive text entry, and another might require a fraction format.

You can now view the Answer Format Tips when you are previewing an assignment or question, so that you can see what they will look like to your students. Remember, you also have the option of turning on or off the Answer Format Tips for a class or for an assignment.

Another question-coding feature recently released lets you create tutorial-style questions that guide students through a concept step-by-step. If you have been coding your own questions using the tutorial tag, you can now have the tutorial question open in a new window as a practice question. The popup window helps indicate that it is not part of the original question and not for credit. Your students can practice the tutorial information before answering and submitting the question.

To use this feature, just add type='popup' to your tutorial tag. For example:
<tutorial type='popup'>

You'll notice improvements to the graphing tool. For example, the handles for rays and segments are now displayed as either open or closed. Let us know what you think of the graphing tool improvements.

Occasionally, you might notice a new informational message within WebAssign near the top of the page. These are Faculty Memo messages from WebAssign administrators that will be used infrequently to provide you with important relevant information. For example, a Faculty Memo could inform you of a new feature for your textbook, a new way of rostering, or an upcoming workshop. On the technical side, a Faculty Memo could inform you of scheduled maintenance downtime.

When a memo is posted, a message box is displayed near the top of the main WebAssign window.

You can email the Faculty Memo to yourself for later reference or remove it from display using the mail and trash buttons in the upper right corner of the memo.

Check out our latest enhancements and new features. Tell us what you think. Do these new features help you? We hope they do. What future enhancements would you like to see implemented?

Remember, we will have a new release every month. Our next release will be May 5. Stay tuned.

The WebAssign Team