Some zyBooks have end-of-section exercises, intended for students to do offline and submit in some other manner (like on paper, or uploaded to an LMS). The reason is that, unlike regular textbooks, every zyBook, having been written natively for the web, already comes with hundreds or thousands of integrated learning questions ("Participation Activities"), and many also include auto-generated "Challenge Activities" to serve as traditional homework problems. For many instructors, those activities, plus some custom homework problems created by the instructor, serve as a strong approach.
However, for a few subjects, instructors still requested additional non-interactive end-of-section exercises. This is largely because some exercises are hard to auto-grade, such as proofs. And partly because instructors of certain topics are accustomed to having a large set of exercises to choose from, from their previous textbook. As we seek to serve our instructors and students, we invested in creating a full set of end-of-section exercises for certain zyBooks, similar to a traditional textbook. We provided these additional exercises for free, and did not increase the zyBook's price. Those end-of-section exercises are intended to be used as in a traditional textbook, for offline homework or some extra practice.
A key improvement over the traditional approach is, rather than an instructor having to copy-paste solutions and somehow providing those solutions to students, in the zyBook the instructor can simply click the exercise's solution visibility icon to expose the solution. This not only saves instructor time/effort, but the solution's placement is better for the student's learning as well.
The above context is important to understanding the usage of end-of-section exercises by those instructors who do not create their own homework problems. Note, for example, that the zyBook does not have a mechanism for uploading student solutions; the zyBook is not a learning management system (LMS). And of course, the zyBook does not auto-grade those exercises.
How are exercise solutions revealed?
Revealing a solution can be done by clicking the toggle next to the specific problem.
In the below example, problem a's solution will be available to students but problem b's will not.
A student would see the following,
Can solutions be revealed in bulk?
The short answer is no.
The above context is important for understanding how the solutions are intended to be used. Solutions are intended to be exposed for exercises that the instructor assigned as homework. Of course, instructors have some leeway in exposing a few more exercises if they wish to provide more examples for students. However, we do not expect instructors to expose all the solutions of a section and certainly not of the entire book, just as any publisher does not expect an instructor to hand out copies of the instructor's solution manual to students. When students purchase a traditional textbook, they are not entitled to access the instructor's solution manual. Therefore, we do not have a button that causes all solutions of a section to be revealed, since we do not expect instructors to reveal all solutions.
And, as a final note, we ultimately hope that, with continued development, the Participation Activities and the Challenge Activities will someday replace the need for such end-of-section exercises entirely. Such activities provide a more modern, learner-centric approach to providing students with opportunities for formative assessment. We hope to spend more efforts on developing more such activities, while also supporting instructors' wishes for traditional exercises.