
A wims site allows two types of connections: connections as anonymous visitor,
or connections as registered user.
<p>
The connection as registered user makes it possible to exploit one of the
basic features of a WIMS system: student-teacher interaction and analysis of
progress.
</p><p>
The wims system organizes user registration into classes. A class can be
created in the server by a teacher (
!href module=adm/class/regclass click here
 to create a class), who becomes afterwards the supervisor of the WIMS class.
Students can then register to the class as participants. Registration of
participants can be done in several ways: <ul>
 <li>The creator (supervisor) of the class declares the class `world open',
 allowing anybody to registrate as participant. This mode is not advisable
 because the supervisor looses control to its class.
</li><li>
 The creator (supervisor) of the class protects the class with a password
 which he keeps secret. So the supervisor is the only person who can register
 people to the class.
 </li><li>
  The supervisor of the class protects the class with a password, and
 communicate the password to his students. People knowing the password can
 register to the class by themselves.
</li></ul><p>
After the creation of the class, the supervisor can pick up works and assign
them to participants. A work item can be any module in the wims server:
course, exercise, tool, game. To do so, the supervisor has only to call the
corresponding module. The latter will contain a link (which only appears for
supervisor logins) allowing him to insert the module into a work sheet of
the class.
</p><p>
Assigned works of the class are grouped into work sheets. A work sheet is
created by the supervisor, and may contain a certain number of work items.
Once the preparation of a work sheet is finished, the supervisor activates it.
This work sheet will then appear in the participants' home page of the class,
allowing them to work on the assigned works.
</p><p>
When a participant finishes an assigned exercise with success (partial or
total), he will get some points. These points are gathered and analysed
by the wims software, and the result of the analysis is accessible (in real
time) both to the participant and to the supervisor.
</p><p>
When assigning works, the supervisor can decide on the number of points each
participant should obtain on the exercise (hence the number of times he should
repeat it), and the weight of the points in the statistics.
</p><p>
The analysis of the results is for the time being very rudimentary in the
current version of wims, and will be enhanced in the future.
</p><p>
The system also allows the supervisor to distribute messages to
participants, and each participant to write to the supervisor. Planned for
the future, forums for live discussions within a class will also be
available.
</p>
