These materials may cover a wide range of topics, including syllabi, homework and lab assignments, lecture notes and slides, and solutions. Providing these materials on-line can greatly enhance a student's learning experience. With students regularly checking the WWW for course information, it would seem logical to also provide student's with feedback on their performance via the Web. However, distributing grades on-line brings a challenge not associated with other types of information. Security, ease of use, and flexibility were the major design concerns.
Security is maintained by the use of username's and passwords.
Utilities exist to aid in the creation of these accounts. To further ease administrative tasks, grade files may be created as spreadsheets and then exported to WWWgradebook. The grade file syntax allows for the storage of many types of grades, i.e. homework, lab, exam, course, etc. Additional types of grades are easily configured by the instructor. The system also supports courses with multiple sections by allowing grades for each section to reside in individual files.