Getting Started: Customizing for Your Class or Department

MathXL provides a variety of course-management and customization tools. You can easily add and modify content, create and assign online homework and tests, and monitor your students' progress. When you have created a MathXL course, students can enroll in the course and use MathXL on their own to practice and improve their skills.

MathXL courses provide an ideal self-paced solution for students who want to work on their own to practice and improve their skills. Once students have registered for MathXL, they can use the program independently (without your involvement) to take pre-loaded sample tests for each chapter of their textbook, receive a study plan based on their test results, and link from the study plan to unlimited tutorial exercises similar to those in their book.

Here are just a few of the ways you can customize a MathXL course to fit your individual needs or the needs of your department:

• Customizing course coverage: When creating a course in MathXL, you can choose which chapters and sections from your textbook you wish to include. If, for example, you do not plan to cover a certain section from your textbook, you can remove that section from MathXL so that your students' online experience matches your course syllabus.
• Creating online homework and tests: You can use MathXL's Homework and Test Managers to create online assignments for your students. MathXL provides a database of free-response online exercises -- correlated to the section exercises in your textbook -- that you can choose from to create homework and tests for specific chapters or sections.
• Creating your own exercises: You can use the MathXL Exercise Builder (MEB) to create static and algorithmic exercises for your online assignments. A library of sample exercises provides an easy starting point for creating questions, and you can also create questions from scratch. Exercises can include number lines, graphs, and pie charts, and you can create custom feedback that appears when students enter answers.
• Setting test options: MathXL's Test Manager offers a wide range of options for creating and assigning online tests. Instructors can:
  • determine how long a test will be available to students
  • decide how many times students can take a test
  • set a time limit for a test
  • create a password for a proctored test
  • decide whether and when students are allowed to review a test
  • select options that determine whether students can re-take an incomplete test
• Managing grades: MathXL automatically tracks and stores all student results. The MathXL Gradebook gives you tremendous flexibility in managing your students' scores on homework, tests, and tutorials. Options include:
  • weighting individual assignments
  • setting relative weights for homework, tests, and tutorials in calculating overall scores
  • selecting which test attempts to include in calculating average scores
  • omitting or deleting results for individual assignments
• Copying your course: If you have spent time customizing your MathXL course and wish to use the same course next semester, you can copy your existing course. The new copy preserves all your customizations while giving you a clean Gradebook for the new semester.
• Sharing your course and managing course groups: You can let other instructors copy your course; you can also let other people help you manage your course by assigning them a "teaching assistant" role. To coordinate across multiple sections of the same course, you can set up a course group, where assignments in the "coordinator" course automatically appear in the affiliated "member" courses. This option is ideal for departments that want to maintain a standardized syllabus across multiple sections taught by different instructors.