Leaving hints online

Question

I am sending identical tasks/questions (pdf by email) to a group of students who are at very different levels.

In order to make it interesting for all of them, I would like to supplement the tasks with hints, e.g. (1) no hints for the good students, (2) a small hint for intermediate students and (3) a larger hint for weaker students.

I would like to leave those hints online (with a link in the pdf) so that students can download them as needed. It is not a test situation and I trust the students, so there is no need to track who used what hint (though that could be nice feature if possible).

Is there an easy way to set this up with tools that are readily available (I don't want to build my own web server or have the students install anything.)? The hints would only be short snippets, nothing big.

Answer 1

The easiest way is to trust your students to self assess and include links marked for beginners & for intermediate in the single PFD. Otherwise you can have 3 pdfs one for each level of hints content with the links (or lack of links) in and send them to the appropriate sub-groups of students.

One possible location to store such hints, (perfect for snippets), would be github gists. (Note that if you create a secret gist it is visible to anybody with the URL but should not appear on search engine results but Secret gists aren't private!) More about Gists - of course your organisation may have alternatives such orphaned pages in a wiki or web site.