Join us at this summer’s WebAssign Users Group Meeting 2012 to meet our next spotlighted professor, Brenda Shryock. Brenda has been teaching mathematics for over thirty years with the last sixteen years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her focus is on the precalculus and calculus disciplines with a typical class size of 35-50 students.
How long have you used WebAssign?
I’ve used WebAssign for 3 years.
Are there any particular teaching practices that you employ to help your students learn?
We use a very traditional and structured approach with homework, tests, and a final exam.
What WebAssign features have worked best for you?
With multiple sections and very few changes with a given edition of a textbook, we use the propagating feature frequently.
What are some of your WebAssign best practices?
We have one WebAssign assignment per section of the text that we covered and give students three attempts on each question part (but only 1 attempt on multiple-choice items) with at 20% penalty on the 3rd attempt. Students have access to practice another version, but only have access to WatchIt on the 3rd attempt. Students can request an extension online within 24 hours of the due date/time with a 50% penalty. We also provide links within WebAssign for the students to course notes, handouts, and old final exams. One of my favorite features is the ability to create a pool of questions for online testing purposes.
Have you attended a WebAssign Users Group meeting before? If so what did you take away from it?
I have attended WAUG the past 2 years. It is great to speak with others in attendance to see how they are using WebAssign. I get a great deal out of attending the coding sessions.
