Annual Report 2020

Happy 2021! Quite a few people have asked through various channels the last few weeks about how Runestone is doing. So it made sense to answer that question in the form of an annual report. The mission of Runestone Interactive LLC is to “Democratize textbooks for the 21st century”. There are two important components to that mission:

  1. Democratizing Textbooks — what that means is that ALL students should have equal access — for free — to high quality books. Expanding outward a bit I think the ideals of democracy also encompass our committment to student privacy. If it was possible to run Runestone with zero student personally identifiable information, I would do it.

  2. What are textbooks for the 21st Century? This was really the genesis of Runestone, that textbooks, especially computer science textbooks ought to encourage active learning and therefore BE interactive. I’m really proud that not only are Runestone’s textbooks highly interactive, but many of our features have PhD quality research behind them. I can trace six different contributors to Runestone who have used Runestone or developed features for Runestone as part of their PhD Work.

    I think there is more to come here as we learn how to apply machine learning to the data we have been collecting over the years. Imagine if the textbook could intervene and give the student intelligent hints? Or what if the textbook could “see” the early warning signs of a student about to lose their way in the course? There is much to aspire to in creating textbooks for the 21st century!

In the rest of this report I want to give you an overview of a few of our accomplishments during 2020, particularly in the areas of growth and financial viability. I’ll try to restrain myself and not dive into all the Python and Javascript code I’ve written this year!

Overview

2020 was an exciting and good year for Runestone along many fronts.

  1. We experienced huge user growth, partly due to the pandemic, and partly to new books with great support and large reader bases.

  2. We hosted nine new (to Runestone) textbooks.

  3. We hosted five Math textbooks, our first outside of CS, thanks to a partnership with the PreTeXt project.

  4. We made strides toward making Runestone sustainable, experimenting with ad serving and ramping up our efforts in getting support from institutions and individuals.

  5. We hosted over 200 instructors in our first virtual workshop, held in June.

  6. Several colleges have used Runestone as an integral part of their capstone project experience for students. This is an amazing way for students who have learned from the Runestone textbooks to give back — by helping with development.

  7. We put in place legal Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and a formal information security policy.

  8. The University of Michigan funded a major development effort to create an exam builder. This is still in Beta but you’ll hear more about this in 2021.

Key Metrics

Registered Users

The graph below shows the cumulative number of registered users on Runestone Academy starting in January of 2019. You can see the sharp uptick in the number from about mid august of 2020 to late september of 2020. The number of users is very much tied to the rhythms of the school year as we see big numbers at the typical starts of each term. However as we serve students around the world this is somewhat moderated by the fact that in the southern hemisphere the cycles of the school year are the opposite of the northern. Much of the growth in fall registrations is due to the CSAwesome curriculum and the many high schools that have adopted that for their AP CSA courses.

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graph of user growth over the last two years

You can see the cyclic nature more clearly in the following graph that illustrates the number of new courses created each week. Particularly interesting in this graph is the spike of new courses created in March 2020, around the time of widespread stay at home orders in the USA.

Courses

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Graph of the number of new courses starting each week

Courses for each Book

The majority of the Runestone traffic comes from a few of our books. The CSAwesome book has been a huge hit, taking the number one spot from the How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (thinkcspy) book in 2020. The Foundations of Python Programming book continues to show good adoptions as an alternative to thinkcspy in the Python area. The Webfundamentals book, which has continue to evolve since I wrote it for my own course about five years ago continues to do well. Finally the How to Think Like a Data Scientist book, written with the support of Google, is seeing some traction outside of the original group of 20 schools that were guinea pigs for that book.

One of the challenges is that we have great materials on Runestone Academy but have always relied on word of mouth as our marketing and advertising strategy. I think many of our books are poised for big growth if we can figure out effective ways to spread the word. One of the reasons that CSAwesome is so popular is because of the training and professional development opportunities provided by the CSAwesome team that brings in hundreds or thousands of teachers each summer and introduces them to the materials.

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Graph of all courses created in 2020 by the book used

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Graph of the number of students using each book in 2020

Page Views

The number of registered users and formal courses tell only about half of the story for Runestone. Roughly 50% of the traffic we experience is from search engine traffic. Daily we see an over 300,000 page views on runestone.academy, or over 2 million page views a week. According to Alexa Internet, that puts Runestone.academy in the top 10,000 websites in the United States. And the top 1% of all websites in ithe world! Hard to believe.

As you can see, the weekends are dramatically lower traffic as this graph over the last two weeks confirms what we have all long suspected about our students work habits. It is also why I update all the books and push bug fixes on saturday mornings.

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Total pages views each day for the last two weeks (partial day for Jan 27).

Financials

In May of 2018 I took an early retirement package from Luther College to work full time on Runestone. This was a big leap of faith, but softened by the package offered by Luther. After making that leap I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to get a contract with Google’s Engineering Education group that allowed me to work on the Runestone platform and develop content for one of their initiatives. That contract (originally for five months) stretched until June of 2020. So revenue was not really a concern until June of 2020. Since then we have taken some steps to meet the goals of making Runestone sustainable, and of allowing me to continue to devote full time to working and supporting all of the students, teachers and authors using this platform.

Expenses

On the expense side we had a total of $18,000 in expenses. We can break things down into the following categories:

  • Hosting: $5,000

  • Health Insurance: $6,000

  • Financial service charges: $750

  • Legal Fees: $450

  • Other Business Expenses: $5800

Hosting charges have more than doubled for 2020 due to the increased traffic to the books as well as the increased use of languages that require service side support — Java and C++. The legal Fees were largely for reviewing our privacy policy and terms of service, but increasingly school districts are asking for us to sign legal contracts in order for their teachers to use Runestone. Many times those agreements run 20+ pages long and are hard to read for a non-lawyer. Most of them are in my view quite unfair, and expect Runestone to promise to reimburse the school district for any expenses they incur in the case of a data breach. All for a service they are receiving for free!

Revenue

Given that we really started to focus on Revenue in mid-summer I’m very pleased with our progress on this front. We had a total of $65,000 in revenue. Our major sources of revenue break down as follows:

  • Support from individuals through Paypal, Venmo, Patreon: $10,200

  • Support from Colleges and School Districts: $20,000

  • Grant and Consulting Income: $31,000

  • Advertising Income: $3,500

I’m really pleased with how this is working out. The difference between Revenue and Expenses leaves about $47,000. As I easily put in 40+ hours a week coding, maintainnig, and supporting instructors and students Runestone, that does not work out to a great hourly salary. It is less than half of what I would like it to be, but it is a great start! It is also a labor of love. The support from researchers at Elms college, and the University of Michigan has been wonderful. The $100-$300 level of support from many high schools and college departments obviously adds up and I hope that will continue to grow. It is pretty easy to project that our Advertising income will grow quite a lot in the next year as the number for 2020 only includes the fall quarter. As a reminder, Advertisments are ONLY shown to users who are not logged in, which means that the vast majority of ads are shown to people who arrive on Runestone through some kind of search.

If you are an instructor and can encourage your students to support Runestone or can persuade your department to provide some support that would be awesome! If you are a educational researcher and would like to include Runestone in a grant, lets talk!

Many people have suggested that I simply charge every student $10 or $20. However, as I mentioned in a blog post earlier this year one of the “True North” guiding principles for Runestone is to keep textbooks free for students. It makes it harder for us to stay viable but I believe with your help we can do it.

Challenges and Goals for 2021

The challenges for 2021 are many and varied

  1. I am currently in the midst of rewriting the core Runestone Server. We cannot overcome our scale issues by simply spending more on hosting fees. Runestone is built on a foundation that is over 10 years old. Moving to a modern web framework requires a lot of work, but will pay off.

  2. Growing overhead for Privacy and other legal agreements. I am 100% in favor of student privacy, and as I’ve repeated many many times, I will never sell student data, I will never give away any data that risks exposing any student’s identity. But there has to be a solution to dealing with schools that want me to sign onorous legal agreements for a free service.

  3. Growing the community. If there is one thing I have learned in the last two years it is the importance of building community around the Runestone books. The huge growth for the CSAwesome books is partly due to great content and partly due to the amazing community that Beryl Hoffman and Barbara Ericson have built around that book. If you have some time and energy to devote to creating a community of practice around any other book I would be happy to have your help.

  4. Continue to grow revenue. I can only dream of the day when our revenue brings in enough money to hire a second full time developer or a support person. If you have an interest in Search Engine Optimization, and would like to help us out in an ethical way I would love to hear from you. One additional project that I’m committed to is to remove the links to twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. Although, in the beginning I thought this was a great way to increase the visibility of Runestone through social media, it seems that now it is mostly a benefit to their advertising platforms. Time fo those links to go.

  5. I’m happy to say that the National Science Foundation has awarded an IUSE grant to Barbara Ericson for Peer+, a system to support both in-person and remote Peer Instruction in Runestone ebooks. In Peer Instruction students vote for an answer to a hard multiple-choice question individually, then discuss it with a peer, and then vote again. The instructor then displays the results of both votes and discusses the answers and misconceptions. We will mine historical data from the current ebooks to identify good questions for Peer Instruction and also add questions from public question banks. We will test the effect of Peer+ on learning, student satisfaction, and student retention.

  6. I would like to develop a formal advisory board for Runestone along with a succession plan in the event that I am eaten by a bear on one of our camping trips, or run over by a car on one of my many bike outings! We already have an informal advisory group consisting of a group of Authors that meet on zoom every couple of weeks. Namely Bryan Jones of Mississippi State, Beryl Hoffman of Elms College, Barbara Ericson of University of Michigan, Jan Pearce of Berea College, and James Juett University of Michigan. Others pop in from time to time but I am very grateful for this group that provides regular feedback and wisdom! In addition if you are an operational person and would have an interest in helping Runestone by being the go to person for keeping the servers up and Running or have an interest in becoming a Docker/Kubernetes expert I would be only too happy to give up the responsibility for care and feeding of our servers.

As we begin 2021 I am feeling very hopeful. Although most days I feel like I’m a juggler juggling one too many balls, I think Runestone Interactive is poised to live up to our big goals! That cannot happen without your help. If you like to code, there are lots of easy starter tasks to take on to get you started. If you like to interact with other instructors, how about adopting a textbook and helping to build community for that book? If you like to write or make videos, how about helping us with our documentation? If you have some influence or some spare change laying around your department, how about supporting in future of Runestone?

We have a great mission — Democratizing textbooks for the 21st century! Help us achieve it.