Annual WeBWorK report

As we near the end of the year, it feels like a good time to report on Runestone’s foray into WeBWorK hosting. In Fall 2020, Runestone began this service. Three factors contributed to this:

  • Runestone had just set up its own WeBWorK server to support PreTeXt books that use WeBWorK.

  • The MAA hosting service was coming to a close, and many users would soon have no hosting service to turn to.

  • The COVID pandemic was on the upswing, and institutions everywhere were looking for new (to them) online tools to support remote learning.

So it seemed like a useful idea for Runestone to offer a WeBWorK hosting service. For that first Fall 2020 semester, hosting was free while we assessed the cloud computing and customer service demands. Since January 2021, hosting incurs a $100 fee per course.

Facts and Figures

Over the terms and semesters of 2021, the service has supported:

  • 62 institutions in 8 countries (55 higher ed and 7 secondary)

  • 117 individual sections

Our revenue from this service was $10,800. For transparency, here is where this money has gone. These numbers are preliminary, as the year is not yet over. But I expect they won’t differ by a significant amount. - $5400 to Alex for work hours - $1493 operational expenses - $1076 Runestone paying taxes - $1365 transferred to The WeBWorK Project - $1365 retained by Runestone

The last two items are particularly important. These amounts may be small, but they contribute to a future of sustainable support for WeBWorK and Runestone. Each project is an open source software development, and relies on “tens of thousands of dollars” in annual development. That is in quotes because for the most part, the work is done by unpaid volunteers. That’s not a sustainable practice, and we lose good contributors to burnout. Real funding will help the developers feel appreciated, and in some cases buy out a chunk of their day job duties (say, one course release) and provide real time for their efforts.

Moving Forward

My goal is to grow each of those last two numbers up to $4000 for next year’s report. I think this can be accomplished considering:

  1. Growth in the number of subscriptions. Already from Spring 2021 to Fall 2021 there was a lot of growth. So even if there is no more growth, 2022 will have more revenue than 2021. But it is reasonable to expect continued modest growth.

  2. Raise the average cost per course to around $120. The additional money would go towards WeBWorK and Runestone, not labor costs or operational costs. My hope is that with transparency like this report, a price increase like this is not ill-received by subscribers. The increase is to support the software itself.

  3. Offer and highlight other avenues for contributing. For example, a higher tier course subscription option.

There are other factors to consider for a new pricing scheme.

  • Should secondary schools pay the same as higher ed institutions? It is typically more difficult for a secondary school instructor to have an expense like this approved. In general, the budget is tighter and there is more red tape.

  • Some institutions have a dozen or more courses, and some have only one. Should there be some sort of departmental discount?

  • Some courses have a dozen students doing 5 exercises once per week. Some courses have several hundred students doing 30 exercises twice per week. Should a pricing scheme address that discrepancy? Certainly the high volume courses are the ones responsible when we need to upgrade our cloud computing resources.

The Runestone Team will study the options soon and publish a new pricing scheme that will come into effect Fall 2022. (There will be no change in the $100 fee per course through summer 2022.)

Other Significance

In the course of managing a WeBWorK server across multiple institutions, a few WeBWorK bugs were naturally exposed and have been addressed. Typically, something to do with a course’s time zone differing from the server’s time zone. Also, with so many users having one clear contact to report a perceived bug, this has been a good feedback collection device. And then simply to support multiple institutions using the same server, a number of new features were added. Overall I credit around two dozen improvements to WeBWorK 2.16 and (upcoming) 2.17 to this Runestone hosting project.

Thank you to all of our subscribers. You are supporting the continued improvement of two significant open-source apps for higher ed. May these projects continue to grow and serve you better.

Alex Jordan