Abstract:

This work presents an analysis of the experiences about the use of the web-based homework platform WeBWorK in an undergraduate level engineering school in Mexico. We present the experiences of students, teachers, and the institution as a whole. UPIIG is a unit of the IPN, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, one of the largest public Universities in Mexico.
One aspect that we consider important is the policy of the Academy of mathematics teachers at UPIIG of assigning at least three common WeBWorK problem sets to all students sharing a math course each semester. This policy on one hand makes possible for the students to attend office hours with different teachers having a common framework. On the other hand, teachers have the opportunity to know how other teachers approaches to different subjects of the curriculum, because they help on office hours to students not necessarily enrolled in their courses. Collaborative work is also a fundamental part of this experience, from the student’s point of view, due to the characteristic of WeBWorK of assigning different versions of the same problem to different students, students work on groups to share procedures to solve a problem. Being near of technology to do their homework, the students look for alternatives to solve it, for example math software, which is an activity to enhance their skills on problem solving using all tools available, and manipulating expressions and graphs. The immediate feedback and the possibility of trying a problem as many times as necessary to get a correct answer promote that students work hard on their homework, but also allow them to obtain a correct answer by trial and error, although the balance seems to be positive. From the teacher’s point of view the saved time grading homework is used designing projects, and web based activities to enhance the teaching-learning process.

Institutionally there are also important experiences to note: There is a natural and good way to keep track of the evolution of math education, brings a good opportunity to think about online courses having an efficient way to do the assessment, increment the use of technological resources: servers, bandwidth, etc. and gives the possibility of applying diagnostic tests to new students in our school.
This work will be a tool for the analysis of new possible innovations that math teachers in UPIIG can implement.

Keywords:

WeBWorK, web-based homework, common homework, collaborative work.