WebWork

Students

Caveats

• Changing your email address in mid-course will cause your homework to be split between two user IDs -- when you log in to webwork after the change you won't be able to see your old homework. This is because Gauchospace identifies you to Webwork using your email address. It's best to avoid mid-course email changes if possible. If not talk to your instructor so they know to combine your grades by hand.

Common problems

• Hold shift while clicking reload to bypass your browser's cache.
• Disable any ad blocking or script-blocking extensions, or whitelist webwork.math.ucsb.edu. The MathJax library used to display equations requires Javascript.
• Click "User settings" near the top left corner of the course screen, and change "View equations as" to "images".

• Click "User settings" near the top left corner of the course screen, and change "View equations as" to "images". Alternatively, try a different browser.

• Use the WebWork homework links on the Canvas course page to access WebWork; do not directly bookmark the WebWork course page.
• Do not use the Canvas app to access your courses on a tablet or phone; use the web browser instead. The app does not do the handoff to Webwork properly.
• Reload Canvas, and log back in if necessary -- your session may have expired.

Instructors

Useful information

• Linking homework sets to Canvas
• Manually adding a user to a Canvas course

Known issues

• setmaker.js: /webwork2/instructorXMLHandler: Forbidden error: This long-standing bug is triggered if you try to use the Library Browser to add problems to a homework set when there are no existing homework sets in the course. The workaround is to create an empty homework set in the Hmwk Sets Editor (using the Create tab) first, then add problems to it.
• Using certain characters in the Description field of the Webwork link can cause authentication errors. Commas, periods, exclamation points, and spaces seem to be OK; colons are known to cause problems.
• "Draggable proofs" may not be draggable. This can be fixed by adding a couple of files to the course template and html directories. See the README file here for more information. If you need help installing these files ask the webwork admin.

Administration