Documentation:WeBWorK/The WeBWorKiR Project: Integrating WeBWorK with R

WeBWorK is widely used in math courses around the world, but its adoption in statistics has been limited. One reason is that while WeBWorK implements a broad range of arithmetic and calculus-type operations, it has little support for statistical concepts such as probability distributions or statistical models.

The WeBWorKiR (WeBWorK integrating R) project offers a solution in the form of integration between WeBWorK and the statistical computing software R. The open source software R is extremely popular in statistical research, analysis, and education. It provides a huge range of operations for statistical computation and graphics. The WeBWorKiR project has two main goals: (i) to allow WeBWorK to communicate with R and (ii) the creation of a large collection of homework questions for use in undergraduate instruction in statistics. With the WeBWorKiR project, instructors can use R code in their WeBWorK problems to generate data, perform analyses, and create figures.

WeBWorKiR has been developed in the Department of Statistics since June 2012, with funding from the Teaching and Learning Improvement Fund. It has been used in a number of second- and third-year Statistics courses at UBC, reaching around 3000 students so far. The aim is that problems created and tested on students through the WeBWorKiR project are made available to all educators via WeBWorK's Open Problem Library.

If you are an instructor, for information on writing WeBWorK questions that make use of R, please look at the WeBWorKiR authoring guide.

If you are a WeBWorK system administrator, you can find setup information in our WeBWorKiR installation guide.