President's Perspective

Summer’s here! Time to take a breath and think about how you want to set up your courses for next year. Take some time to review what is new in WebAssign, and use some of our new features when setting up your courses for the fall, such as email notifications of student extension requests or uploading files for your class in Resources.

When choosing a textbook for your course, consider whether it includes questions, exercises, problems, simulations, tutorials, or other interactive instructional materials. With textbooks supported by WebAssign, you can offer exercises that relate directly to the lesson at hand. Your students will appreciate the enhanced learning resources such as simulations or Personal Study Plan modules currently available with a few textbooks. The Personal Study Plan is a new feature that helps students assess their progress toward specific learning goals by pinpointing topics that they might need to brush up on. Your students can take quizzes on course material by chapter or section to prepare for upcoming tests or the final exam.
 

You can use forums in WebAssign to increase communication among your students. Forums provide an easy way for students to help each other solve problems off hours and to help the entire class stay up to date, since students read and respond to topics and posts that are pertinent to the class.

The new class Resource feature allows you to upload files to use as resources for your courses. Now it is easy for students to access your materials, such as PowerPoints, PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and html pages.
Remember that when setting up your class, you must turn on certain features for your students, or they will not be able to access them, such as forums, Answer Format Tips, Ask Your Teacher, or Practice Another Version. You will also notice that when you set up your class in WebAssign, you will now see the pricing information for the textbook you’ve chosen.

See the Creating a Course help topic for detailed information on how to use any of these features.

I wish you a great start for the upcoming academic year. Please feel free to contact me at risley@webassign.net any time you have a question or suggestion.

John Risley, President

Main article

Rostering and authentication made easier with Shibboleth integration
Your institution can now use Shibboleth to make authentication with WebAssign easier and more secure as well as enable automatic roster creation and synchronization for your WebAssign classes.

Shibboleth is open-source middleware designed to allow access to protected resources, such as WebAssign, based on credentials provided by your institution. When Shibboleth is configured and deployed at your institution, WebAssign can direct login queries directly to your institution’s servers. This means that your WebAssign account information never leaves your institution’s network, enhancing security while providing WebAssign with up-to-date student enrollment status. In addition, Shibboleth allows automatic roster creation and synchronization for your WebAssign classes, saving you, the instructor, time and effort. Currently, Penn State University, Ohio State University, University of Washington, and University of Virginia are using Shibboleth for students and faculty who log into WebAssign. For more information on how your institution can implement this free solution, ask your IT staff to contact WebAssign at support@webassign.net.
 

Penn State University

At Penn State University, approximately 1,200 students use WebAssign in their physics classes. Physics instructor John Hopkins found that when it comes to choosing a textbook for your course, WebAssign has a wide variety from which to choose. Hopkins comments, “One of the features that attracts us the most to WebAssign is the variety of textbooks that are encoded within their system. It seems that every publisher wants to sell us their own proprietary system that works only with their textbooks. By choosing WebAssign we are able to select textbooks from virtually any publisher.” Such a wide selection of textbooks available underlines the flexibility you have as an instructor when using WebAssign. Hopkins goes even further, comparing WebAssign and another online learning tool: “It was interesting that when we compared WebAssign with Mastering Physics a few years ago, WebAssign had more of the end of chapter questions from the textbook that was paired with Mastering Physics than did Mastering Physics!”

Quick Tips

Choosing a Textbook
Here are some tips on choosing a textbook to use with your course in WebAssign.

• Most textbooks in WebAssign include traditional end-of-chapter questions. So look for titles that include a large number of questions that have already been coded by WebAssign.
• Some textbooks include a range of pedagogical enhancements that go beyond assessing what your students have learned. These might include learning aids such as tutorial questions that guide your students through a concept, interactive simulations that help your students to visualize relationships, or additional course materials that you can use in the classroom. Look for titles that offer interactive content to enhance your students’ learning experience.
• Some titles also offer personal study plans, which allow students to quiz themselves on the textbook material to determine if they are adequately prepared for upcoming tests.

Some of these enhancements are indicated by icons that are displayed below the textbook.

Motivating Your Students by Using WebAssign’s Gradebook
One way that you can motivate your students in WebAssign is to use the WebAssign Gradebook. If you set up your Gradebook immediately, students can measure their progress in your course from the beginning. Allowing students to see their grades encourages them to work harder. And as an instructor, you can immediately see which students are having difficulty, allowing you to address problems sooner rather than later.