Runestone Partners with Edfinity to bring homework system to CS1

Today I’m pleased to announce Runestone’s partnership with Edfinity, our first commercial partnership! Edfinity provides affordable access to exceptional homework problems and assessments customized for any textbook. While Edfinity has focused on the Math and Physics markets thus far they have chosen to partner with Runestone as they move into the computer science world. Edfinity was created with the NSF support (Awards #1758301 and #1943530) - they are best characterized as a for-profit social venture with equal focus on educational research and educational technology. Since the launch of their Math/Physics homework in Fall 2019, over 125 institutions have adopted Edfinity for one or more introductory courses.

Shivram Venkatasubramaniam, CEO of Edfinity has this to say: “Runestone offers high-quality instructional content on a mature, open platform for introductory computer science that has gained adoption at hundreds of institutions across the US. They have a relentless focus on educators needs with a view to delivering superior learning outcomes, and a vision borne out of their deep experience as educators. We, therefore, view Runestone as a natural complement to the Edfinity homework/assessment platform - together Runestone and Edfinity are very well-positioned to serve the needs of educators and students at scale - not just for Computer Science, but other STEM subjects as well. Runestone’s value proposition as an open, interactive textbook platform applies equally to other STEM disciplines”

In eight years of providing textbooks to the computer science community the Runestone team has learned that even for a free textbook, that is only the beginning of what schools are looking for. Many instructors are looking for a commercial class homework system to compliment the Runestone textbooks. The partnership with Edfinity will fill that void. Instructors, especially those teaching CS for the first time, need pre-packaged assignments and assessments. Over the next few months we will be working with the Edfinity team and the community to develop homework and assessment packs that not only complement the How to Think like a Computer Scientist and Foundations of Python Programming text books, but can be easily paired with any commercial textbook for a fraction of the price. A math educator commented recently - ‘Edfinity is as close to free as you can get for a commercial quality homework system’ - I expect this to be true of the Edfinity/Runestone CS homework offering as well. Longer term we will work together to make the experience of using Runestone with Edfinity as seamless as possible.

As an immediate first step, Edfinity is funding several paid positions for undergrads, faculty and high school students (openings and postdoc - please contact me if you are interested) to help write and test exercises, unit tests, quizzes and exams to accompany the textbooks. I’m really excited for this opportunity to work with the team at Edfinity, it’s clear that they are laser focused on bringing a world class homework and assessment system at an affordable price to instructors that really need it. To see how Edfinity works you can check out some of their math offerings on their website at edfinity.com/catalog or drop a line to Sid and Shivram at hello@edfinity.com.

Runestone and Edfinity will be actively piloting our new offerings with several of you during the coming months, with full availability scheduled for Fall semester 2020. This is designed to be a community-centric effort and we invite your participation and assistance to any degree both in terms of conveying your needs to us, and in helping to build out an exceptional corpus of questions and unit tests. Please contact me with ideas and suggestions.