Opening Assessment in Problem-Based Courses: A WeBWorK Pilot Case Study

This presentation was delivered at the 2024 Open Education Conference in Providence, Rhode Island

Large-enrollment courses tend to produce assessment headaches for instructors in nearly any discipline. And when courses depart from testing and grading by hand, assessment can become even more complex. These assessment challenges can reduce the likelihood that an instructor chooses an open textbook. While subject matter experts have begun to generate human created and/or AI-written/human edited test banks for their topics, these testbanks typically align to QTI formats, which are multiple choice, lack graphics, and don’t meet the needs of some courses especially those in math-intensive disciplines. In 2023, Departments of Mathematics and Statistics at Virginia Tech, with support from the University Libraries Open Education Initiative began piloting WeBWorK, an open-source hosted software solution already used at many institutions. We present a case study of this pilot project, discuss project framing, decisions, impact, WeBWorK and OER adoption, and our hopes for the future.

Attendees of this session will be able to: -Describe programmatic efforts to explore homework software in a campus or system environment. -Meet other people dealing with math assessment and mathematically-rich homework software issues. -Find further information regarding low-cost and open homework systems -Be able to articulate the use case for a system like WeBWorK. -Summarize our programmatic efforts, reflecting on decisions made, the capacities of our team members, barriers and lessons learned, and results part-way through year two.

A recording of this presentation is available at: https://youtu.be/y8iTeyQJLFE