Here are some basics for using WebWork2 in our department. You can find the details in the offical website for WebWork.
An uploadable classlist is a comma-separated textfile with nine fields, only two of which need to have anything in them. The fields are, in order:
student_id, last_name, first_name, status, comment, section, recitation, email_address, login_name
The only essential fields are "student_id" and "user_id". These have to be distinct, one for each student. The student_id will be the student's initial password. For both the login_name and student_id I used the part of the student's email address that comes before the "@". That also becomes the student's default password in the system, so tell your students to change their passwords! For "status", I use "C" which stands for current for each student. You can use those come with the roster from toroweb. If you don't include the status students will get an error message the first time they log on. For example,
khello9, hello, kitty, C, 555-1234, , , khello9@cp.csudh.edu, khello9
would be the entry for the student hello kitty whose school email is khello9. So initially, both her login_name and password would be khello9. I use her telephone number (from toroweb) for the comment field. It is not a required field though. One more tip, students usually forget that they may have a number in their login names.
Starting with the Excel roster file that you get from ToroWeb it's pretty easy to create the file that webwork needs. Open the Excel roster file and delete the rows that do not contain students. (On my file the first two rows contained labels, not students.) Now in column A you will find students full names (in lastname, firstname format). Webwork needs lastnames and first names to be in different columns. We can produce these easily using Excel text functions.
So, for instance, suppose the contents in cell A1 are "Hello, Kitty". If you enter the function =LEFT(A1, FIND("," ,A1)-1) into cell ,say E1, then the function will output "Hello" in cell E1. By filling this command down column E1 (or copying the command from cell E1 and pasting it down the rest of column E) you will fill column E with the last names of your students.
Similarly if you enter =RIGHT(A1, LEN(A1)-FIND("," ,A1)-1) into cell F1 the result will be "Kitty". Using this you can fill column F with the students' first names.
If the email addresses are in column C then entering =LEFT(C1, FIND("@",C1)-1) in column G will output the part of kitty's email address before the "@" sign. I used that as a login_name.
Now copy the columns that we just created into the correct positions in the classlist, using the "paste special" command with the "values" option selected (instead of the default "all") to prevent Excel from clobbering the values if we change the contents of columns A and C. According to the classlist specification above, last name is the second field so it should go into column B, first name is the third field so it should go into column C, and so on.
Once the data are in the correct columns and you have removed or replaced everything that you don't need (e.g. replace the full names in column A with student_id's), save the spreadsheet using the "save-as" command as a commma-separated textfile (*.csv file).
Excel will give your filename a ".csv" extension. You'll have to replace the .csv extension with .lst (that's dot-ell-ess-tee) to make webwork happy. So for instance if Excel created the file classlist.csv, just rename it to classlist.lst
Now uploading to WeBWorK is easy using WeBWorK's web-based tools.
Login to your course account then click on File Manager. Now double click into the templates folder. Then click on the browse button and locate the prepared classlist file (which should have a .lst extension) in your machine. Follow the instructions from your operating system. You can then click the upload button. And the file will appear in the templates folder. Once you have done that, click on Classlist Editor then select Import users from file... chose the file you have just uploaded from the drop-down list. Click on the "Take Action!" button then you are done.
One way to do this is to click on the Library Browser button. Choose "Create a New Set in This Course" and give it a name, say HW1. Then WebWork will assign the set HW1 (now empty) to you automatically. To add problems to the set, select one of the school (later on we can contribute to the problem bank) say Rochester. Then selecting a problem set from the drop-down menu and then click "View Problems". Then you can select the problems one by one or if you want to use most of the problems there, click "Mark All For Adding" then you can check off those that you do not want to include instead. After selecting the problems click on Update. WebWork will then tell you how many questions are added in this update. Note that an existing problem set may be more problems that you are viewing in one page. But you cannot select them all from different pages then update. You have to do an update for each page separately.
Once you have created homework sets, you need to assign them to students. One way to do it is by using the function in Instructor Tools. Once you get in there, you can highlight the homework sets the you want to assign on the right, then highlight the students (usually all of them) that you want those sets to be assigned to. Then click Assign.
You may want to change the open day (the day when the set will be available for the students) of the homework sets. Again there are many ways to do that, for example, you can do it in the Hmwk Sets Editor.
Also, if you are teaching more than one sections of a course. You certainly want to create homework sets that are similar of your sections. First, create one for one of the sections you have. Then choose Export (there are options in the drop-down menu) in Hmwk Sets Editor. The definition files of the sets you export (they are text files) is located in your templates folder. They have .def as their extension. For example, the definition file for HW1 will be labelled as setHW1.def now download this file to your local machine using the file manager function of WebWork. Then login to your other section, upload the definition file to your templates folder. Once this is done, you will see it again from the drop-down list of the import function in the Hmwk Sets Editor.
Basically, this is the same as creating a homework set. Once you are done with picking your favorite questions and put them into a new set, say test1. You can see it on the Homework Sets menu. This time choose "Download Hard Copy for Selecting Set" then you will see the option to download the tex file of this set. You can then modify the file to produce your test using latex. Now you may have picture generated by WebWork. They are located in the html/tmp/gif directory of your WebWork account (you can get there once again by using the file manager function). Download them and covert them into eps files by running them through bmeps. Your need to do that because latex may not recognize the original format of these pictures.