After the July 6th, 2007 upgrade, you will need to install a new MathXL Player by running the updated Installation Wizard within your MyMathLab or MathXL course.
Take a tour of the new features, or see the information below for news about the great new features you'll see in MyMathLab in time for fall classes.
Question Pooling
When creating tests or quizzes, instructors can create a "pool" of exercises from which one question is drawn. For example, you could select five exercises to create the pool for question 1 on a test. Each student answering question 1 will see one of the five pooled exercises, randomly chosen. Because the values in most exercises are also regenerated each time an exercise is viewed, exercise pools significantly reduce the likelihood that two students will see the same question and values.
Upload Student IDs to Gradebook
Instructors can upload student IDs or another identifier unique to their institutions to their gradebook via the Edit Roster page. Once uploaded, the student IDs will appear in the gradebook as well as in exports of student results, thereby ensuring an exact match with the institution’s learning management system.
Drop Lowest Scores
Instructors can choose to drop up to the five lowest scores in each assignment category (homework, tests, quizzes, other). These dropped scores appear grayed out with the label “low score” in the instructor’s gradebook and the student’s results page. Lowest scores are based on student results at the time the scores are dropped.
Change Scores
From the gradebook, instructors can modify student scores based on assignment due dates. They can
either add or subtract points or increase or decrease the score by a percentage. Names of students who turned in assignments past the due date appear in red on this page, and scores changed this way are marked with
an asterisk (*).
Item Analysis for Individual Students
Instructors can see at a glance how a student performed on an individual assignment by clicking that assignment’s score in the gradebook or choosing Item Analysis from the Action drop-down menu on a student’s results page. Student-level item analysis now includes the number of attempts a student made on each question (for homework) as well as the question order (for tests or quizzes). This data can be easily exported.
Add essays and web links to custom questions
Using the MathXL Exercise Builder, you can create essay questions to assign in tests and quizzes. You can include sample answers to the essay questions that your students can review after they take the test or quiz. You also can insert hyperlinks to web pages into your custom questions. Students working on the question can click the link to go to a web page that contains information they need to answer the question.
Advanced Gradebook Exports
Instructors have many new options when exporting student data from the gradebook. These options include exporting results from all categories at once and exporting scores as points rather than percentages. Instructors can also export Study Plan results, time spent (for individual assignments as well as a total for all assignments), date worked, last login date, and weighted average of selected assignments. Because advanced exports may take time to generate, these exports are prepared in the order submitted, and instructors will receive email notification when the exports can be retrieved. (Coming in August.)
MyMathLab Video Lecture Podcasts
For selected courses, video lectures in MyMathLab are now available as downloadable podcasts for students to watch in iTunesŪ on their Video iPodsŪ. In addition to watching video lectures for each section of the text in MyMathLab, students who have iTunes on their computer can now use a page in their course to download podcasts of these same videos at no charge.
