Pedagogical use

• Practice on own what have learned in class
• Many questions from the textbook
• Short assignments several times a week help keep students up with material
• Randomized numbers mean students can't simply copy someone else's final answer
• Students know right away if they got the answer right, and many keep working until they get it right
• Changes student-instructor dynamic: instructor can be seen as an ally against the computer
• Frees instructor to devote more time to other areas

Potential traps

• Students can become result focused and do not pay attention to process
• Easy to assign overwhelming amount of homework
• Instructor can loose touch with where students are

Input types

• Numerical
• Multiple choice
• Multiple select
• Symbolic (enter equation)
• Fill-in-blank (match text string)
• Essay (not automatically graded)

Special question types

• Multimedia focused--students obtain part of information from animation/simulation
• Java response--e.g. Java applet to evaluate if a graph is drawn right