The COW Instructor Handbook

In this guide to COW instructors, you can take a look at what the COW does and how to work with it. Here are some things you can find out about:

• Guidelines
• Class Lists
• The Reporter
• Homework Design
• Viewing and Revising Homework
• Generating Reports
• Enter your Main Page

COW is typically used by students outside the classroom, at home or in a computer lab at a high school or college campus. At Temple, the Math Learning Center in Curtis Hall is an excellent environment for students to do COW work; the machines are fast and the tutors are available for questions.

The COW URL is:

http://www.math.temple.edu/~cow.

This note is written to you as an instructor - or a potential instructor - of a basic calculus course at a college or high school. Building COW into your course requires no special syllabus or treatment of the material. COW will not affect what you do in the classroom, your style of teaching or the way you use class time. At most, a little orientation at the beginning of the semester may help your students until they get used to the system, and an occasional reminder that you have posted a COW assignment.

As an instructor, you will have access to the Reporter. This is a convenient web utility for assigning homework to your class and generating reports on their work. The mechanism is described below; it is easy to use and requires no programming or special language. You just fill in boxes and click on buttons. In order to gain direct access that part of the system, use the address

http://www.math.temple.edu/~cow/report.html.

Guidelines

To encourage students to do homework, COW work should count for a non- trivial fraction of their final grade.

• We recommend 10% - 20% for the COW grade.

For Temple University instructors:

The assignments are appropriate for Math 85. For Math 75, you may wish to ignore the later assignments on integration.

You should generate occasional reports on your students' work (using the Reporter) to make sure that they are keeping up to date. You will be able to see which students are doing the work, and how well they are getting it.

Class Lists

Once your class list has been installed in electronic form in the COW system, your students will be registered and you will be recognized as the instructor of that section. For Temple University instructors, the COW will have a current classlist for your section(s) by the end of the first week of classes. Classlists will be updated at the beginning of the second week of classes, after registration has settled down a bit, and again later in the semester. Normally you do not have to be concerned with these updates. However if you added unregistered students by hand, for example someone auditing your class (which you may through the reporter) then you will have to add them again after each automatic update.

It is important to understand this:

• Nothing that you do can erase a student's recorded work.
• However, a student can do recorded work only if his name appears on a classlist.

cow@euclid.math.temple.edu.

• The subject line should be the word classlist followed by a space and then a number (1, 2, etc) that tells the COW which of your sections' classlists you are submitting. Please do not use any other symbols here that may confuse the COW mailer: just "classlist   number". This number is not the official section number, but the place in which the section appears when you enter the reporter.
• The first line of the body of the message must be the word name followed by a symbol such as % (or the character) and then the word id:

  name % id

• The rest of the lines in the body of the message are the entries in the classlist, in the format

  Newton, Isaac % 123456789

  where in place of % you put the symbol you used in the first line and the number is the student's SSN or ID number.

Your students will use COW to see homework assignments, do the assignments or practice exercises. There are also some modules which allow them to experiment by choosing their own functions, parameters and so on, and seeing the effect on some calculus construction or calculation (we call this "hands on" work). The procedures for using COW are described in the COW Student Manual, which you should read yourself and recommend to your class.

The Reporter

The Reporter has two main functions:

• Creating and assigning COW homework for your class;
• Reporting scores on the homework or other COW work.

1. Logging in:

• Enter your name (in the form First Last)
• Enter your password (your COW instructor password, as assigned to you at the beginning of the semester).
• Click on the Enter button (or on the About button to reread this document).

2. The Main Page:

• A list of the courses under your supervision is displayed (often just one course) in the left hand column of a table. The second column contains the list of existing assignments for each course; this may say "none" at the beginning of the semester, if no assignments have been pre-installed. The third column contains a number of buttons which control the various actions of the Reporter; to initiate an action, click on the corresponding button.
• You can also get to this Main Page by clicking on the Enter button at the bottom of this page.

Homework Design

You can assign the standard homework set to your class, or you can create your own homework assignments. If you choose to design your own, follow this procedure:

1. Log on to the Reporter. If you have more than one section, choose the courses for which you want to design a homework assignment. The homework will be assigned for all chosen sections. If you have only one section, no checkbox shows and you do not need to be concerned by this. Now click on the Design homework button.
2. You will be presented with screens which allow you to navigate down to the part of the course (a book, chapter or section) from which you want to choose modules for the homework assignment. When you get to the level you want, click on the button that lets you See the problems.
3. You will be shown an index of the chosen set of modules with the problems color coded according to difficulty level. At the top of the screen, you can choose the name and due date of the assignment. Assignments are due one minute before midnight of the day you specify.
4. Choose appropriate problems from each module you like and type this information into the input box for that module. While designing a homework, the COW recognizes the following type of constructs:

   1,2,3,5 (meaning precisely these problems)
   1-3,5 (meaning 1,2,3,5)
   any 4 (meaning any four problems of the student's choice)
   

5. When the assignment is ready, click on the Create assignment button. The resulting screen will display your assignment and offer a chance to Edit the assignment or Save it. Also, once you have constructed a homework assignment, buttons become available on the main screen to allow you to go back and Revise the assignment or Change name or due date.
6. Once created, the assignment will automatically be posted to your students, who will be able to view it whenever they log in for a recorded COW session. You can also view it as an instructor from the Reporter with the View assignments button. Assignments can be removed from the list using the Delete assignments button, but be careful using this one.

In the COW manager window, log in to the COW using the password "showall", leaving the name field blank. When you get to a module and open it, you will see a new button called Show the problems. A click on it will display all the problems in the module ... but this screen will take some extra time to produce, so be patient.

Viewing Assignments

To view one or more assignments, check the boxes by the assignment(s) you wish to view, then click on View Assignments. Click on Main Page to return to the main page.

Revise an Assignment

To revise (add or remove problems assigned), check the box by the assignment you wish to revise and then click on Revise; you can revise only one assignment at a time. This will lead you to a page showing the whole book you originally assigned homework from, or the whole COW library if you assigned from more than one COW book. From this point on, the Reporter works as described in Homework Design above. You can also (or only) change the name or due date if you wish; when saved under a new name, you create a new assignment without removing the old one. If you only wish to change the name or due date of an assignment, see Changing due dates below.

Deleting Assignments

To delete one or more assignments, check the boxes by the assignment(s) you wish to delete, then click on Delete Assignments. In a new page the reporter will list the assignments you selected and their contents and ask you to click again on the assignments you wish to delete, in case you change your mind. Click on the Remove selected assignments button to permanently remove the assignments selected in the second round. Or click on Main Page to return to the main page without making any changes.

Changing due dates

To change the name or due date of a homework assignment, check the boxes by the assignment(s) whose names or due dates you wish to change, then on Change name or due date. From here on it's quite intuitive.

Special Due Dates

The Reporter looks at the due date for an assignment when scoring it and reporting on it, and will ignore work done after that date. Occasionally a student has a special reason to need an extension of time to complete an assignment, for illness or other personal matters. Using the Special due date button on the reporter Main Page, you can change the due date for that student only. The procedure is simple and intuitive, just follow instructions once you click on the button. You must select the student or students, select the new due date and click on Save. You may view special due dates for specific lists of assignments by clicking on those assignments and then on View special due date.

Reports

This part of the Reporter utility produces reports on the students' COW work. There are two types of reports currently available:

1. Reports on a COW assignment or on a set of assignments.
2. Reports on each student's total COW work up to that point.

• the regular form, simply called a "report".
• the long form, called a "full report".

The full report has three columns of scores:

R = the number of problems solved (as above)
A = the number of unsuccessful attempts on problems
N = the number of problems attempted and never solved

If a particular student has been granted a special due date on an assignment, the Reporter will know about it and will take this into account when scoring the assignment for that student. To generate a report on specific assignments, follow this procedure:

1. After logging in to the Reporter and reaching the Home Page with your list of courses, choose the assignments for which you want a report.
2. Click on the Report button (for the short form) or Full Report button (for the long form).

1. After logging in to the Reporter and reaching the Home Page with your list of courses, check the boxes by the sections you wish to report on. If you have only one section its box is implicitly checked.
2. Click on the Report all activity button.

You can have this report e-mailed to you automatically by clicking on one of the e-mail report buttons (for regular or full forms). We must have your e-mail address on file for this feature to work.