WebAssign is the premiere product of Advanced Instructional Systems, a privately-held company incorporated in North Carolina. Our CEO, John Risley, Ph.D., specializes in physics education as a professor in the Department of Physics at North Carolina State University. The company is located on the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.

History of WebAssign

WebAssign was developed by teachers for teachers. Aaron Titus, a graduate student in physics education at North Carolina State University, and Larry Martin, a physics professor at North Park University in Chicago, independently developed web-based homework systems in the mid-1990s. During 1997 and 1998, Titus and Martin collaborated to create WebAssign, a robust online homework and testing management system. Piloted in several large classes, feedback from instructors and students in physics, math, statistics, and chemistry was instrumental in expanding and refining the product.

WebAssign became commercially available in January 1998 as a hosted subscription service, ensuring top performance and a shared database of questions under Professor Risley's leadership. From the beginning, comments and suggestions from instructors at both high schools and colleges/universities have played a critical role in defining new features.

In 2003, Risley's team moved from the university to Centennial Campus.

WebAssign Today

Today, WebAssign is the leading provider of powerful online instructional tools for faculty and students. Partnering with all major textbook publishers, WebAssign offers customizable precoded questions from a wide range of math and science textbooks along with easy-to-use tools that allow instructors create their own questions.

Our team of 130+ employees includes programmers, content specialists, writers, editors, designers, and instructors who work together to maintain the system, create new features based on user feedback, and provide comprehensive customer support.

To date, more than five million students have used WebAssign to submit over one billion answers to homework assignments, tests, and practice problems. In return, the students have received millions of pages of feedback on their work. During any one term, more than 500,000 students are using WebAssign at over 1,500 educational institutions worldwide.