The instructors/TAs who are in charge of multiple sections are often faced with the decision of whether to create a merged section WeBWorK course or keep their sections separate. If you are in this situation yourself, here are some pros and cons of having merged and non-merged sections:
Merged Section
| Pros |
Cons |
|---|
- Easy to manage, only one course to login to, all the students and homework sets are in one place.
- Only need to create each homework set once.
- No need to transfer scores for those students who switched within merged sections.
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- Hard to separate, someone would need to put the section info into the system to separate the students for scores or extract individual sections from exported data (see this page for steps to do this)
- Cannot assign different open/due dates to the same homework for different sections.
- Instructor/TA will receive emails from the students from all sections when they use the "Email Instructor" function in WeBWorK.
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Non-merged Section
| Pros |
Cons |
|---|
- Clear separation. Exact course mapping from SIS. Easy to download the score files for each section.
- Instructors/TAs in charge of their specific section can only see the files/data in that section.
- Can assign different open/due dates to the same homework for different sections.
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- Students may login to the wrong course and encounter an "access denied" error.
- Need to login to multiple courses to manage (Thanks to the Shibboleth Single Sign On, you only need to login once as long as you don't click on logout before going to the next section).
- Need to create homework sets multiple times (The homework sets can be exported/imported once created the first time).
- If a student switches sections, you will need to transfer their WeBWorK scores from their old section to their new section.
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Hopefully this helps you make a decision about merged/non-merged sections. Please feel free to add anything missing to the above tables.
