Here’s what I learned from a day writing questions in WebAssign — I’m a fan of its randomized question-writing engine. It’s quite flexible and can do just about everything I want with the feature.

As a long-time Moodle fan, I think I’ve been convinced to make the switch to WebAssign. Lemme show you some of the stuff I learned:

Randomized Questions

I can write randomized (Moodle calls them calculated) questions. Here’s what that looks like to the student:

WebAssign supports all the usual question types such as multiple choice, numeric answers, and matching. (By the way, the second part to the above question above uses a new-to-me feature: physPad, a symbolic equation editor. More on physPad later.)

When coding these randomized questions, I can do something like this:

$v = randnum(342,348,1);

which means make the variable ‘v’ be a random whole number from 342 to 348.

Because the WebAssign authoring system is based on Perl syntax (I’ve used it before), I found it fairly straightforward to adapt to the code. Below is a question I wrote with a multi-part randomized set of questions. In case you’re wondering, line 2 shows a weird workaround for randomizing numbers less than one.

I’m impressed at WebAssign’s documentation, which includes video introductions and fully-documented details. Check out “Create Numerical Questions” for example.

Multi-Part Questions

I mentioned multi-part questions above. These were tough to do in Moodle, though possible. Multi-part questions are important to me because I can string together several questions into a coherent whole. Here’s another I wrote:

With more time, I’m eager put together smart multi-part questions that help  students move from concrete arithmetic to symbolic algebraic problem-solving.

physPad is Promising

Oh, so working with numbers is too juvenile for you? WebAssign also has a feature to write symbolically. Below is an example from the student POV:

The interface is similar to most WYSIWYG equation editing software out there, plus obvious keyboard equivalents do what you want (for instance, I used the slash key to create the fraction above instead of the physPad button).

I’ve played with some answers that are mathematically identical but look different symbolically and the system was smart enough to recognize a correct answer in several forms. I’m eager to push the limits with physPad.

Direct Measurement Videos Included

Peter Bohacek’s Direct Measurement videos are the bomb and they’re a resource available to WebAssign users.

The Verdict?

WebAssign is robust. Combine the question-writing interface with the numerous supported textbook question banks, and I think I’ve got myself a pretty good  system for online testing and homework. WebAssign may replace Moodle for me this year.