Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

WeBWorK integration with D2L Brightspace

Posted by Andy Freed

WeBWorK is an interactive homework platform hosted by the PCC math department to support math instruction. Over the last couple years, several dedicated instructors have built a library of dynamic questions for several course levels so that students could use the platform for practice and for assignments as part of their math classes. There are several publisher platforms that offer online practices as well, but WeBWorK is available at no cost to the student.

We worked with Alex Jordan late this summer to evaluate an integration between D2L Brightspace and WeBWorK. The integration at that time allowed for a single sign-on between D2L and WeBWorK so that students didn’t have to log in to access their homework problems. This kind of integration is frequently requested, but doing the integration is never as simple as you’re led to believe. We have developed a 3rd party integration evaluation process to ensure that integrating with an external platform doesn’t create issues for students, faculty, or us as an institution. We reviewed the security of the platform, the user agreement (none, in this case), the usability and accessibility (including a test by a screen-reader user), and finally a technical integration evaluation.  WeBWorK passed each with flying colors, so we enabled the single sign-on integration just before fall term.

Today, we met again to investigate the option to do grade pass-back. This functionality is relatively new. The integration itself is based on Learning Tools Interoperability (or just LTI to us dorks), and relatively recently, both D2L and WeBWorK’s developers built in support for version 1.2 of the LTI specifications which allows for grade pass-back.

Our testing revealed that the grade pass-back can be relatively complicated. Setting up a single “cumulative” grade column is very easy. But setting up grade columns for each activity is far more complex. In fact, it has enough challenges that we’ve decided not to support it yet. But we are going to enable “overall” grade pass-back. And it’s not that we think our instructors aren’t capable, it’s just that the integration needs some more time to gestate so that it doesn’t create more confusion.

The cumulative grade, or course grade, shows you approximately what percentage of the WeBWorK activity score has been completed, and at least gives the instructor a sense of how each student is progressing through the homework content.

So very soon you will be able to get more details on the Math SAC’s spaces page, but you can get details on setting up the simple Single Sign-On integration now with this WeBWork integration howto page.

If you want to evaluate the integration with another tool, please contact me.