Web-based problems: Your instructor has problems on the web
that you are to answer on-line. These problems are usually available anywhere
that you have a web connection. This part of the homework can be found at http://www.mathclass.org . Connection to
the system requires a web browser, an individual student account (which is
free) with a login and password. Read the lengthy instructions below, then
obtain an account, choose a password, and register (click on Request
Registration, do not click Add
for Browsing Only) as a member of the WHS class that corresponds
to this course. The system has a lot of features, so the directions below are a
bit complicated.
Some important notes:
·
For each web assignment there is separate personal version
for each student and a common version for the whole class. Your
homework score depends only on your performance on your personal
version by the due date listed on the homework
schedule.
·
You can submit answers to a question on an assignment any number
of times. The system maintains a complete record of all submissions. You
receive credit for a problem if you submit the correct answer at least once
before the homework set expiration date passes. The subsequent submission
of an incorrect answer will not cause you to lose credit for a problem.
·
When you submit your responses before the due date the homework
system will only inform you whether your answer is correct on each problem
submitted. After the due date the system will also provide the expected answer.
This means that you must do the exercises before the due date or you don’t get
credit. The WHS system has a feature that you can use to determine those
questions that you have failed to answer correctly.
·
Since the questions on the common version (everyone has the
same common version) are very similar to those on the personal versions, you
can work with other students on the common version to help you understand how
to correctly answer the questions on your personal version. At all times
the system will provide the expected answers to the questions in the common
version, so you should use the common version to help you understand how to
answer questions on your personal version!
·
If you choose not to participate fully in this part of the course
you are choosing to reduce your course grade by at least one letter grade.
·
Your score on a homework
set is the percentage of all
the problems in the set (not just those submitted) to which you have submitted a correct answer by
the set’s expiration date.
·
Waiting until the last moment (
·
If you forget your WHS username or your WHS password then, after
you contact your instructor, it will take some time for your instructor to
correct the situation.
WHS (Web Homework System) is a web-based instructional support system which
provides for auto-checked homework sets. The WHS system has been developed, and
most of the documentation has been provided, by Professors Paul Eakin, Carl
Eberhart, K. K. Kubota at the University of Kentucky
Mathematics Department. WHS is a
dynamic system in which the basic functionality is stable but the interface
changes frequently since new features are continually being added. Thus do not be surprised if there are a few
details and diagrams in what follows that do not correspond exactly to what you
see when you login to the system.
You
might wish to use your UTC email account for your email address in the
following registration directions. Every UTC student is automatically provided
an email address - if you don’t already know it go to http://www.utc.edu, click on Current Students,
then Student Email Directory (under Campus Life) and type in your name. If you
have problems with accessing your email account, contact the Help Desk at (423)
425-2678. I also recommend that you use your social security number as your
password so you won’t forget it.
Registering:
Pass
the mouse over the “Web Homework”
bar on the left side of the MathClass main page and
press “Register” (as a New User)
near the center of the screen. This will
place you in the Registration Screen.
Select
the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in
the “School” menu. Now fill in the remaining information. The requested social
security number is used only within the system to uniquely identify your
account. If you object to providing your social security number you can
enter any 9-digit number of your choice.
However, be careful to make a note of the number you provide since it will become your initial password
and the definitive identifier of your work on the system (if you choose a
number already in use just choose another number). Your
email address will be your login ID and it will be the address used by the system
and your instructor to give you homework results and other important
information so do not use someone else’s email address. If you change your
email address in the system (this can be done at “Account Modification” on the main WHS screen as we will see
momentarily) then the login is automatically changed to the new email address.
To activate your new account press the “Submit
Information” bar. This completes your registration.
Adding a class:
Select
the “Add/Drop Classes” link on the WHS main page
Since
you are using an account that lists “
In
the Select Class pull-down menu select our class. Now Request Registration in our class by
pressing the “Request Registration” bar. Do not press “Add for Browsing
Only”. Selection for browsing provides
access to the course materials but does not
provide for course participation, communication with the instructor, etc. Most
important, as a browser you will not
get credit for the homework you submit.
You now have registration pending for your class at UTC. So you have the same status as a “browser”
until the teacher actually admits you to registration in the class. Now you can
access, work, and submit any of the course homework sets and receive results
and feedback from the system. As soon as the instructor approves (in the
system) your actual registration he will have access to your results on all
course assignments and the system will create convenient email-based lines of
communication between you and him.
However it is important to know that you can go immediately to work without
waiting for registration approval. Once your registration is approved all work
done while in browsing status will be available to your instructor exactly as
if you had been registered from the start.
One final remark on registration is in order. If you are registered in a class the
teacher can change your password. That is, any teacher in a class in which you
are registered can change your password. This is advantageous since it means
that if you forget your password you need only ask the teacher to reset the
password for you. It can be disadvantageous if you misuse the system since the
instructor can change the password and not tell you the new password.
To drop a class select it in the “Drop Class” menu on the “Drop/Add” screen and
press the “Drop Class” bar.
Pass
the mouse over the word Login in the middle of the MathClass
main page, type in your login name (i.e., your email address) and your password
(initially your social security number) and press “Login”.
Once
you successfully log into WHS you will be at the WHS main screen. The left side
of the screen has a column of eight “rollover bars”. Touching one of them with
the mouse will cause a corresponding page in the display to the right.
Now
it’s time to get to work, which means doing an assignment. When you select the “Assignments” link on the
left side of the WHS main screen you get the assignment screen on the right
that contains two menus that you will use. The “Class” menu allows you
to select a course in which you are registered and the “Assignment” menu gives you a choice of all assignments on the
current list for the class. Our class list has, or will have, a number of
assignments. Choose the first by selecting this assignment in the menu and
pressing the Personal
Version bar.
For the moment leave the (optional) version number blank.
If you want to get credit for doing an assignment in
this course you must work and submit your Personal Version. A Common Version, which
always provides correct answers, is available for practice. I strongly
recommend that you make use of this version to help you understand the
material!
Note
the version number in the upper left corner of each assignment. Entering this number on the “version” line
before pressing “Specific Version” will give you precisely this same homework.
The common version always has version number –1 but every student’s personal
version is different and chosen by the system.
After
you have entered a few answers press the “Submit
and Record Results” bar at the bottom of the assignment and the system
promptly returns a web page containing the complete statement of each problem
attempted and whether the response was correct or incorrect. On all assignments
you can improve your score by correctly answering any question that you missed
on previous attempts. If you don’t score at least 80% on an assignment you need
to repeat the missed questions until you do. There are bonus points if your
average WHS score is higher than 90%.
Printing Out WHS
Assignments vs. Working at the Computer
Depending on the length of the assignment and
the preparation of the student, WHS homework sets take varying amounts of time.
While it is possible to bring a problem set up on the computer screen and work
the problems one at a time the expectation is that students will print the
assignments out, work them out on paper, and enter and check the answers later.
Problem sets are usually developed with generous amounts of white space. This
space, together with the space on the backs of the pages, is almost always
sufficient to record student solutions. If, after checking with the machine you
subsequently find that your answer is inconsistent with the “official” one, you
can check your work for obvious errors and then, if necessary, consult with the
instructor or a classmate. Experience
has shown that such consultations are much more efficient and productive when
working directly with the printed problems and student solutions. Fully half of
student difficulties with homework involve an understanding of exactly what is
being asked. When this is the heart of the difficulty, having the printed
problem with the diagram in a form on which notes can be made has proven very
useful.
Properly logging out of the system is quite easy.
In the
current system this is done by terminating the browser session. This can be done by
closing down the browser or directing it to another URL (e.g., by clicking on
“Home” on the browser toolbar).
The problem with not logging out is that someone else might sit down and start
to work in that session either naively or maliciously. In the former case the
second person might enter homework answers, thinking he or she was “crediting”
the work to his/her own account. There are safeguards/reminders to guard
against this but students have been known to miss them. The latter, more
dangerous, case is when the second person impersonates the owner of the
account. He/she might, for instance, submit bogus responses to an assignment or
use the system to send offensive comments back to the instructor.
Timeouts protect users who forget to properly log out of a session. In a WHS session if the user interacts with
the server frequently then the server assumes that the person pressing the keys
is the proper owner of the account. If there is a long period of inactivity the
server assumes that the owner left the session and “the bad guy” has taken
over. It then asks the user to prove that he/she is the owner by asking for
his/her identity and password. This is called a “timeout”; they occur after
ten minutes of inactivity if a person is doing anything but an assignment and
after an hour when working on an assignment. Timeouts are particularly likely to occur
when you are working on an assignment one problem at a time, entering the
answers as you go. In this situation the
browser is collecting all of the information locally and goes to the server
only when the “Submit and Record”
bar is pressed. Since under this
scenario it might have been some time since the last trip to the server a
timeout is likely to occur before your answers have actually been
submitted and the result upon pressing the “Submit and Record” bar will be an “Authentication Screen”
If timeout occurs nothing is lost!! The server is simply
saying that it has been sufficiently long since you contacted it directly that
it wants to be sure who is at the keyboard.
The steps to be taken are:
1. Enter login and password
in the Authentication screen.
2. Press the BACK button on
the Authentication screen. (Pressing the BACK button on the browser
toolbar will not produce the same result. If you do press that button,
press the “Forward” button on the toolbar and then press the BACK button on the
WHS screen.)
This
process takes you back precisely to the point at which the action (e.g.
pressing “Submit and Record”) was taken which caused the Authentication screen
to appear. Remember that in this case you
must press the “Submit and Record
Results” bar again. This last step
is important since the system was unsure who actually pressed the bar and did
not record the original “Submit”.
When
you press the “Submit and Record Results”
bar after entering your answers to an assignment the system returns to you a
web page that contains for each question answered:
a. The full statement of the
problem
b. The answer you submitted
c. A comment on whether the
answer was deemed correct by the computer. [Note: A problem with multiple answers is answered correctly only if
every component answer is correct.]
d. If you responded to
either a personal version after the due date or common version at any time, you
will also get the answer(s) the computer expected.
e. An open text box for each
problem that allows you to email your instructor.
In
addition, the system emails back to you a record of which problems you have
attempted in the submission and which were correct/incorrect,
and any comments you submitted regarding the problem.
You
(and only you and the teacher) can check your results for all problems on all
assignments at the “Homework Scores”
screen on the WHS main page. The system presents a table for each assignment
submitted and an easy way to calculate your average on any selected collection
of assignments. I suggest that you select the “Printable Version”. For
each problem answered, in either the “Right” or “Missed” row, there is a link
with the date on which an answer was last submitted. Selection of this link opens a frame
displaying the problem. This permits you to rapidly scan your homework results
and identify the problems with which you have had trouble.