Modify and/or Develop RBA

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• The Text could do with some rewriting. (But, having myself spent a lot of time rewriting it again and again, what kind of rewriting is necessary is not obvious, at least to me, and any extensive rewriting should first, I think, be the object of careful discussions among the future users.)
• The Homeworks could do with more Exercises. Here too, the package permits easily adding, removing or replacing Exercises to any Homework and/or having more or less than 18 Homeworks.
• The number of avatars for each question in the Questions Bank could certainly be increased. The package also permits easily adding, removing or replacing questions, both for the Reviews and for the Exams while keeping them synchronized.
• The Homeworks could be made available in the same three forms as the Reviews.
• The Control Files could be modified to allow retitling exams as, say, MAKEUP EXAM or FINAL EXAM without having to modify them and/or could be merged into a master control file. One could even envision scripts instead of control files or even applications, both of which are beyond me.
• The package could be modified to follow schedules other than the "twice a week for fifteen weeks" semester for which RBA was written and it is meant to accept this kind of changes. Most of the work would involve re-cutting the Text into a different number of chapters—which may prove somewhat less than simple—and changing the Homeworks accordingly—which should not be complicated.
• The Text could use explicit internal cross-references. However, in order to survive future modifications, these internal references should be dynamic, as opposed to just hard-typed, and therefore coded as such in the source. There are LaTeX packages to do that.
• The package is already structured so as readily to accept Supplementary Materials. In particular, files, as well as "switches" to turn them on/off, are provided for (but most files are still empty):
• Problems (Geared to the Text but a bit more open and more substantive than the Exercises.)
• Supplementary Text (Excursions and explorations beyond the Text.)
• Supplementary Exercises (Exercises for the Supplementary Text.)
• Supplementary Problems (Problems for the Supplementary Text.)
• The LaTeX source could certainly use a lot of cleaning-up.
• Whatever else …

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Page Updated January 1, 2008