  Although textbook publishers offer course management systems, they do so to
promote brand loyalty, and while an open source tool such as WeBWorK is
promising, it requires administrative and IT buy-in. So supported in part by a
College Access Challenge Grant from the Department of Education, we
collaborated with other instructors to create online homework sets for three
classes: Elementary Algebra, Intermediate Algebra, and Statistics for
Behavioral Sciences I. After experimentation, some of these question pools are
now created by Mathematica programs that can generate data sets from specified
distributions, generate random polynomials that factor in a given way, create
image files of histograms, scatterplots, and so forth. These programs produce
files that can be read by the software package, Respondus, which then uploads
the questions into Blackboard Learn, the course management system used by the
Connecticut State University system. Finally, we summarize five classes worth
of student performance data along with lessons learned while working on this
project.
