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OKUSON

What is OKUSON?

A software package for delivering exercise sheets and administrating exercise courses via a web interface.

Here is an example of usage of OKUSON. The data are from a real course but everything is anonymized. The Ids don't exist and there are no names, except those of the OKUSON authors.

Here is a keyword list of some features, for more details see the documentation.

Who has written OKUSON?

Frank Lübeck and Max Neunhöffer at Lehrstuhl D für Mathematik (RWTH Aachen). The package was developed out of experience with previous (non-published) programs by the authors, which were used for several semesters, in some cases with courses of more than 1000 students, at Lehrstuhl D für Mathematik.

Some of these experiences are described in the article:

Frank Lübeck und Max Neunhöffer, Übungsbetrieb über Webservice, Computer Algebra Rundbrief 31 (2002)

Since version 1.1 there is a set of statistics functions (and numerous smaller improvements) suggested and contributed by Thorsten Heck and Ingo Klöcker.

Who can use OKUSON?

Everybody who is interested!

The package is available under terms of the GNU Public License.

We are not able to provide substantial technical support for users of the package. So, users are expected to understand and follow the documentation by themselves. Nevertheless, we are very interested in feedback and suggestions for improvements.

Since an important part of the package is a web interface not everything can be language independent. Currently, the actual texts on the sample web pages are in German. But it should be straightforward to generate versions in other languages. Please, contact us if you are interested in using the package with another language.

Where can I download OKUSON?

The current version is OKUSON 1.2-fix1 (October 16th, 2006).

Here is the gzip'ed tar-archive okuson-1.2-fix1.tar.gz.

WARNING for Suse Linux 9.0 users: Some users experienced that OKUSON has problems with the non-official version of Python, called '2.3+', which is shipped with Suse 9.0. If you have Suse 9.0 we suggest to get python directly from the Python web site; after unpacking the archive python is easily installed by a standard configure; make; make install sequence.

Note on upgrades: For instructions for the upgrade from version 1.1-fix5 to 1.2-fix1, see the file UPGRADE.

If you have already installed successfully version 1.2 you don't need to upgrade to 1.2-fix1. The only difference is a newer version of the XML parser pyRXP, the version in OKUSON 1.2 did not work with the newest python version 2.5.

The file CHANGES describes the changes between different versions of OKUSON.

Is there documentation for OKUSON?

Yes! Here is the documentation in PDF format and here is a short INSTALL file for the impatient user.

Are there plans for future development?

There are currently no plans for big extensions, but we are going to use this package in the forthcoming semesters ourselves; also other institutes in Aachen and other universities are using it currently. We mainly plan to make OKUSON more stable and flexible using the experience from its practical operation.

We want to provide bug fixes as quickly as possible for current users.

If you are considering to use OKUSON for the next semester, you are welcome to contact us with questions, wishes or suggestions.

Is there a mailing list?

We administrate a list of people "interested in OKUSON". Email to okuson AT math.rwth-aachen.de is automatically distributed to all members of this list. We announce new versions and fixes over this list, usually once a semester.

If you want to be added to or removed from that list, please write to us.

Contact: Frank Lübeck or Max Neunhöffer.