A triumph of open source and open content

In 2005 I was in my second year of teaching computer science at Luther College. I had enough experience to adamantly oppose Java as our introductory language, and I had learned about Python at the 2004 SIGCSE conference. I was excited about Python and had been playing with it for a year. There was an excellent introductory textbook by John Zelle who was at a nearby college. In our departmental discussions we thought that Python would be a good introductory language, but we didn’t want to give students one semester of Python and then a second semester in Java or C++. We wanted to stick with Python. So I said to my colleague David Ranum, “lets write our own data structures book!” And so we did. We contacted Zelle’s publisher who was very interested in our idea. We wrote the book in 2005 and it was published in 2007. It has been used at several universities as the primary textbook for the data structures course taken by second year computer science majors, as well as a supplementary text for students in other disciplines. The book has been translated into Spanish as well as Chinese.

The goals for the book were: * To have a strong focus on problem solving, that introduces the students to fundamental data structures and algorithms. * To introduce algorithm analysis in terms of Big O notation. * To use Python as the programming language. * To illustrate that we are all “standing on the shoulders of giants.” In computer science we are building on the work of those who came before us.

I loved teaching from this book. The students seemed to enjoy the problems we introduced and learned a lot. By the end of the course they were all much more fluent in Python and ready to tackle other languages and more advanced topics. They all had good “gut level” understanding of the major data structures and algorithms. I was very proud of the book and the course.

I’m also proud that in the 17 years since the first edition was published we have only had two more editions. There is no need to gouge students every two years with a trivial update. The book is still relevant and useful today.

Fast forward to 2011, I was on sabbatical and was working on the second edition of this book. But I had a serious case of “writers block” my main problem was that I just hated the idea of a paper textbook for computer science in the 21st century. Books should be interactive, you should be able to run these algorithms right in the book! That was the genesis of Runestone Academy. The next step was to convince our publisher that we should make the book freely available online. I’ll never forget the response of our publisher, Jim Leisy, “Lets go change the world!” With that, we were able to make the book available under a Creative Commons license. The book is still available in print, but the online version is the one that is being actively maintained, and through our strong partnership with the PreTeXt project we can write once in PreTeXt and publish both online and in print.

The Creative Commons license is a great example of the “shoulders of giants” lesson we wanted to teach our students as in 2018, Jan Pearce of Berea College in Berea Kentucky took our book and created a version for her students that used C++ as the primary programming language! She kept the Python as “pseudocode,” and added C++ examples along side. The content was what she was looking for but the programming language was wrong. So she changed it! She also added some new content and examples. She then shared her changes back with us, and we were able to incorporate the book into our collection. The C++ edition of the book has been used by over 3,000 students in over 223 courses around the world.

In the Fall of 2023 J. David Eisenberg of Evergreen Valley College in San Jose, CA, took the book and created a version for his students that used Java as the primary programming language! The content was what he was looking for but the programming language was wrong. So he changed it! This book does not have Python as pseudocode, but has a lot more interactive exercises and more of the examples can be run in the book than in the Python edition. He also added some new content and examples.

I can’t tell you how proud I am of these two projects. Even though I was personally opposed to Java (and C++) as an introductory language, we don’t all need to agree. And I know I’ll never convince the college board they are wrong. These two books are a great example of the power of open source and open content. I hope that you will consider using this book in your own courses, and if you do, please consider sharing your ideas or changes back with us so that we can all benefit from your work. I would suggest that the Java book is very accessible to high school students who have had the AP Computer Science A course. The Python edition is very accessible to students who have had a semester of programming in any language. If you are willing to help with any of the editions, but especially the Python edition I would love to hear from you. I would really like to make the Python edition much more interactive.

What is the Scope of the Ecosystem?

One key question that needed to be answered was What and/or who is the PreTeXt / Runestone ecosystem? After lots of good discussion we decided that the ecosystem is best described by a set of principles, anyone or any project that shares those principles may be part of the ecosystem. The principles are:

Our Open Source Ecosystem is a community of students, teachers, authors, researchers, and developers committed to the following principles:

1. We exist to:

   • Help students learn more efficiently

   • Help teachers teach more effectively

   • Help authors write better materials

   • Enable researchers to develop more effective tools and pedagogies

2. We are committed to ensuring access to the best open source learning environment to all of our stakeholders, but especially to the students who need it the most.

3. We embrace the open web and open standards.

4. We welcome new partners who share our values.

5. We will be flexible in creating a platform that incorporates new innovations.

6. We recognize and celebrate all contributors and innovations that move our ecosystem forward.

In an open source ecosystem we are all “standing on the shoulders of giants,” there are countless projects that we rely on to make our software work, however we want to recognize some of the initial projects that are core to our ecosystem:

• PreTeXt - An XML vocabulary for authoring and publishing high quality print and digital textbooks

• Runestone Interactive - A Learning Engineering and Analytics Portal (LEAP) for hosting textbooks, assignments, and interactive learning activities.

• WebWork - An open source online homework system for math and science courses

• Doenet - An open source platform for creating interactive learning activities

It also includes many textbook authors, instructors, and researchers who are using these tools to create and deliver high quality learning experiences for their students. Research is ongoing at several universities including the University of Michigan, the University of South Alabama, and the University of Illinois, UT Austin.

Leadership

We have a long term vision for the leadership of the ecosystem that may become a formal entity like the Apache foundation or an academic society. For our initial work, we have created an advisory council of eight people who represent many different aspects of our ecosystem of Open Educational Resources (OER) and embrace our guiding principles.

The initial leadership council includes the following people, all of whom have committed to an initial two year term.

• Rob Beezer - Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Puget Sound, Founder of the PreTeXt project, author of the open source textbook A First Course in Linear Algebra.

• Matt Boelkins - Professor of Mathematics at Grand Valley State University, author of the open source textbook Active Calculus.

• Steven Clontz - Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of South Alabama, maintainer of tbil.org resource library, and co-author of the PreTeXt-cli authoring toolkit.

• Barbara Ericson - Assistant professor of Information at the University of Michigan, and co-author of the open source textbook CSAwesome.

• Danny Glin - The University of Calgary, and member of the WebWork Executive committee.

• Brad Miller - Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Luther College, founder of Runestone Academy LTD, and co-author of the open source textbook Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures using Python.

• Jennifer Nordstrom - Professor of Mathematics at Linfield University, and author of the open source textbook Game Theory: a Discovery Approach.

• Duane Nykamp Associate Professor and Director of Strategic Initiatives at the University of Minnesota, and founder of the Doenet project.

This group will guide us through the initial stages of the project and help us to create a more formal governance structure as the project matures.

As part of the next steps we will be creating additional leadership opportunities in the form of Fellowships for people who are working to grow our ecosystem. We will also be funding mini grants to inspire and reward contributors to the ecosystem.

Next Steps

There were so many great ideas that came out of the workshop, I can’t possibly list them all here. But we did identify some concrete actions that we need to get busy on in the coming months in order to make this project a success. Here are some of the next steps that we identified at the workshop.

1. Write a Phase II grant proposal for the NSF to fund the next stage of the project.

2. Find a name for the project that is more descriptive of the ecosystem, and will allow us to create a website that will be the hub of the ecosystem.

3. Work on ways to keep the community engaged and build on the momentum from the workshop.

4. Develop a plan for making sure that we are defending the intellectual property of the ecosystem.

5. Continue our discussions and planning to create a sustainable funding model for the project beyond the initial NSF grant.

6. Continue the technical discussions that were started at the workshop. These include a working group for improving the user experience on Runestone Academy; a working group for improving the authoring experience for PreTeXt; continue the the work on integrating Doenet and WebWork with PreTeXt and Runestone.

7. Develop a plan to be more inclusive and diverse in our ecosystem.

Colophon

I have been enjoying using Github copilot with VSCode for both Python programming and writing blog posts. Copilot is based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model. In fact the first paragraph of this post was written by Copilot. I wrote the title and the first few words of the first sentence and it wrote the rest. I did have to edit it a bit, but it was a great starting point. It also had some good and not so good suggestions for other parts of this post, including making up urls to non existent pages. Its really great at taking some of the drudgery out of programming in that it can write a lot of the boring code very quickly leaving me more time to work on the hard stuff. I am looking forward to seeing how this technology develops.

Issues, from the perspective of the author

We already mentioned an attraction for the author: they probably don’t want to do the work of preparing and distributing the print edition.

A commercial publisher would also provide effective advertising – another aspect of self-publishing where many authors fall short.

Also, it is still an unfortunate (and misguided!) fact that open/self-published textbooks are viewed with suspicion by textbook adoption committees. The stamp of approval from a commercial publisher carries a lot of weight.

Primary concerns for the author are price and availability.

The author may have been motivated by the seemingly high price of some commercial textbooks. If they have been self-publishing the print version, it probably sells for around $20. An excessively high price on the commercial print version could be a deal breaker.

The author probably has been making a high-quality HTML version available for free, and probably also a PDF version, and maybe also EPUB. It is unlikely the author would be willing to give up the free HTML version, hosted on a website that they control. It is unclear whether the author would have strong opinions about the EPUB and free online PDF.

There are other author issues, which do not seem specific to open textbooks, such as duration of the agreement with the publisher, what happens if the book goes out-of-print, expectations about subsequent editions, non-compete clauses about writing similar books, royalty rate, etc. As we will see below, some of those issues are in fact different for open textbooks.

Issues, from the perspective of the publisher

By far the biggest issue is dealing with an unfamiliar situation.

Until recently, there were not a lot of excellent open textbooks. Now there are. PreTeXt (https://pretextbook.org/) and Runestone deserve a lot of credit for facilitating authors to create high-quality books with many features that enhance teaching and learning.

So, it will take vision, and a tolerance for the unknown, for a commercial publisher to dip their foot in this pond.

For the sake of argument, consider the situation of an open textbook which is being used at several universities, with free HTML version available online (possibly at more than one website), with a print version from the author (or someone they designated) available for $20-25.

The publisher probably would like the author to stop publishing the print version. It is safe to assume the author would agree, provided that the price did not increase significantly.

The publisher would probably want the existing print version (which probably is print-on-demand) removed from the marketplaces where it appears. Again, the author should agree.

What does the publisher think about the author’s website hosting the HTML version? How does that relate to the home page of the book on the publisher’s website? Presumably those pages should link to each other, because both parties benefit from the success of the other.

How about the PDF version the author currently posts? Probably that is a non-issue, because for PreTeXt books you can print from the HTML, and for many purposes it does what one wanted from the PDF. If there is a reason the author would object to taking down the PDF, I would like to hear it.

EPUB is another issue. Many publishers make money by selling the EPUB: that revenue stream would be diminished if the author posted it for free. The EPUB version is recognized as a valuable resource for people in prison, because it does not require an Internet connection and it does not take up space. This is important to people involved with the Prison Education Project and related endeavors. Both sides should be aware of these issues during the negotiations.

If the above are the main concerns of the publisher, then they have missed some essential facts about the world of open textbooks.

Some realities which have to be discussed and understood

As was already mentioned, the book isn’t the sole and exclusive property of the author.

If the source is available with an open license, anyone can make a PDF version, or produce a print-on-demand version and sell it at whatever price they want.

Anyone can also add a new chapter or section and publish it however they want. Forbidding the author from using that book as the basis for a competing product, cannot stop someone else from doing the exact same thing. And the original author’s name is also on the new book! (How authorship is credited in these situations is untested waters. Open textbooks are touted for their ability to be modified and customized, but in practice this rarely happens and the community has not had to deal with complicated situations.)

The publisher has to accept that they do not have a monopoly on the book: they will be the only print publisher if the author agrees that it is better for the publisher to handle the print version, and nobody else decides that they can do it better (where “better” involves some combination of price, quality, and features).

A clause in a contract may forbid the author from taking certain actions, but if the book has an open license, that contract cannot prevent someone else from performing those exact same actions.

The general point has been made, but I’ll repeat it for this specific case: nobody can stop someone else from adding a small amount of material and publishing it as the “new edition” of the book.

Here is an issue which seems silly but is not: movie rights. The excellent open textbook APEX Calculus has a version with more than 600 videos by Sean Fitzpatrick (not the author of the book, and that version is not hosted by the author) with a cumulative duration of more than 75 hours, explaining concepts and working through numerous examples. Stacking those videos creates a multi-part epic movie version of the book. Whose rights are infringed by that cinematic extravaganza?

Most commercial publishers have a fundamentally misguided policy concerning Braille versions. Each institution which needs a Braille copy has to go to the effort, typically taking months and costing $20,000 or more, of having an expert Braille transcriber convert the book. They are not allowed to then share it with another university! Think about it: not only does the publisher not provide a Braille version, they make it as hard as possible for other people to do so. Textbooks written in PreTeXt automatically convert to Braille, at minimal marginal cost. That fact should have an impact on the publishing contract.

A modest proposal

One possible way to address some of these issues is for the publisher to commission a new edition of the book, and for the author to not release that edition with a fully open license. This would not change the fact that the previous edition was still available open source and with a permissive license. But the publisher’s concerns about competing products would be mitigated by the fact that the anyone other than the author would be several steps away from replicating the published book.

The “edition trick” is not a magic wand

The modest proposal would involve the author abandoning their previous vision for the open source ecosystem of their book. Would they release the new edition with a more restrictive open license, such as CC-Attribution-ShareAlike-Noncommercial, or would they keep the source private and reserve all rights? Would the restrictions apply only to print publishing, or would other online versions also be prohibited?

Is this modest proposal the author’s first step on the slippery slope of producing a commercial book that is exactly what they were trying to avoid when the decided to write an open textbook?

Keeping the fully-functional online HTML version available for free seems like an absolute requirement for the author. Is the author assigning the copyright to the publisher and the publisher granting rights for the online version, or is the author retaining copyright and granting the publisher the right to produce and sell a print version? Or does the book have an open license and the publisher has to accept the fact that keeping the author happy is their main protection against competing print versions?

If the book incorporates material under an open license from another author, putting a more restrictive license on the next edition might not even be an option.

Here’s an ironic fact. Suppose the author decides not to go with a commercial publisher and just releases the new edition with the same open license. Then the publisher can just produce and sell the print version anyway! And they won’t have to pay any royalties!

If I come out with a book that has 80% overlap with an existing book, I will be sued by the publisher, and I will lose. But for an open textbook, even with the “edition trick” I have been given the rights to produce such a similar book based on the previous edition. No agreement between the author and publisher can change that. And the author cannot remove the rights which I have previously been given.

Maybe all of these concerns are non-issues?

Perhaps, with or without the “edition trick”, the online versions of the new edition can function exactly like the previous edition, with the print version now coming from a commercial publisher who provides a modestly priced copy and still makes some money, and nobody is motivated to duplicate either the author’s or the publisher’s work?

There would be very little risk for an established publisher to produce and distribute the print version of an existing open textbook, on just a handshake agreement with the author. The author would agree to not publish a print edition, and would make a reasonable effort to promote the publisher’s print version and discourage others from making a competing print version. The publisher would agree to make their print version available at a price comparable to what the author could do on their own. The publisher would advertise the book in ways beyond what the author could do. Every free online view of the book would be an effective advertisement for the print version. The publisher makes money. The author probably makes a bit less per print copy, but they are spared the work of being their own print publisher and end up making more in the long run because more copies are sold.

The publisher’s lawyers might be unhappy with a handshake agreement, so a contract could codify the points in the previous paragraph. If the contract were for one year, renewable and properly synchronized with the academic year, then it could be workable for one party to handle the print version and traditional advertising, and the other party to manage the online versions and provide support and outreach to instructors using the book.

Are there commercial publishers who can appreciate this business opportunity? Do most open source textbook authors understand that they are not giving up anything if they enter the type of agreement I propose?

I await the publisher and the authors who fully understand the open source ecosystem and its relationship to commercial publishing, and see an opportunity for harmonious collaboration.

Fun Facts

During 2022 we welcomed 74,000 registered students and instructors to the community! That is a lot of new people and a lot of money saved on textbooks! During an average school day we have around 1000 students active during a given five minute period. I think that is something we can leverage moving forward. The traffic on Runestone clearly shows that we have a “homework bump” that is once the traffic slows down at the end of the school day across North America, we have an evening spike that lasts three to four hours. We have no such spike on Friday nights. Also, students do not do homework on Saturdays. In 2022 we had 115,100,000 page views! That is nearly double the number of page views from 2021. About 60% of the page views are from registered users while the other 40% come from searches through Google, Bing, and others.

What makes Runestone Academy Tick?

People, 100’s of people who donate their time in many ways.

• Authors – between PreTeXt and Runestone we probably have around 60 different authors represented on Runestone Academy.

• Developers – Over the years around 100 developers have contributed at least one line of code to Runestone, and around 50 developers have contributed at least one line of code to PreTeXt. Over the years this job has become more difficult as the complexity of the whole system increases. I am aware of this and actively trying to find ways to make it easier for anyone to help with development.

• Dev Ops - Monitoring the servers, building, testing and deploying updates, to our servers, building, updating and deploying updates to the textbooks, are all things that happen weekly. It takes time, although a lot of that time is just keeping an eye on things while they run in the background. For example it takes about 4 hours to rebuild and deploy all of the books on Runestone Academy. Its mostly automated but you have to keep an eye on it for those few times when something goes wrong. It takes another 30 minutes or so to rebuild and deploy all of our servers.

• Bug Finders - Reporting problems to us is equally as important as writing code! I am always surprised by the number of people who just live with a bug instead of reporting it to us on github. PreTeXt is tracking 1242 issues while Runestone is tracking 2216. Of course those numbers are obsolete the moment I type them. Issues come in all forms and we welcome reports of typos as well as serious bugs in the Runestone servers.

• Exercise Creators - Over the years the question bank for Runestone has grown by leaps and bounds - over 14,000 questions not including those that are part of a book. This is a great way to learn a little about restructuredText or soon PreTeXt and contribute to the whole. If you have a good exercise please feel free to add it through the web interface. You can keep it private if you wish or you can share it with all the other instructors out there looking for new homework problems.

• Exercise Editors - With the huge growth in the size of the question bank, we have created quite a problem for ourselves. Many of these questions are just dummy questions that instructors use to learn and should be weeded out. Anyone can help with this problem by flagging a bad question. This puts it in the queue for an editor to take a look at and either delete or update. We need loads more exercise editors!

• Community Builders - Do you know what makes for the most successful textbooks on Runestone? It is an active and supportive community of teachers using that book. The best case in point for that is CSAwesome. It truly is awesome the way teachers help and support each other on the mailing list. But that takes some effort and leadership to nurture Beryl Hoffman and the people at the Center for Computer Science Education do a wonderful job. We need more of that for all of our books!

• Documentation Writers and Trainers - Have you gotten pretty good at some aspect of Runestone? How about taking a look at the documentation and bringing it up to date, or making it easier to understand? By now I’ve lost all perspective of what it is like to be a newcomer to Runestone, but many of you have not. Would you like to host a workshop to train people how to use Runestone? We would be happy to support that!

• Word Spreaders - If you like Runestone or any of its books please help us spread the word. We would love to have everyone recommend Runestone and PreTeXt to two colleagues. We would love to have everyone mention Runestone and PreTeXt on social media. Do you Write a blog? Toot on Mastadon? Post on Facebook? Tweet on twitter? How about a shout out? I have left both Facebook and Twitter but if someone would like to take over the FB page or the iRunestone account on twitter let me know! Anybody can help with this and the more we grow our community the more good ideas we get.

Accomplishments in 2022

Finances

In late 2021 Runestone Academy LTD was formed as a new corporation to supplant Runestone Interactive. We are operating Runestone Academy as a non-profit. Although the conversion process took a lot longer than expected Runestone Academy has also filed our paperwork to get IRS approval as a 501(c)(3) which will give us official non-profit status for tax purposes. We have also named a board of directors to help us think strategically about how we ensure a strong future for Runestone. I am honored to have this group of forward thinking people help guide the way: Paul Resnick, Assoc. Dean of the University of Michigan School of Information, David Farmer of the American Institute of Mathematics, Susan Rodger, former President of SIGCSE and of Duke University, Danny Fenjves former founder and CEO of Upperline code now leads the LEARN team at Giant Machines and Jane Miller our CFO and Secretary/Treasurer who has been a partner in my crazy endeavors for the majority of my life.

The financial details of any transition year can be confusing, especially when trying to compare to a past year, so lets just focus on 2022 and mostly not try to compare to last year.

These are unofficial numbers but they should be pretty accurate. We have several different sources of income including students, schools, ads, partner support from people who use Runestone for their own purposes but want to support our work, Grant money, and consulting work on grants. Here is how that all breaks down.

So, you might think that we have a net profit of about $2,000 which would be great for a non-profit, everything balances. But let me point out a few problems with that conclusion.

1. People costs – $44,607 includes 1 full time person and 1 part time person. Thats not a very good salary.

2. Support from institutions is what we have Invoiced for $17,195 Unfortunately we have been paid only $12,165 of that. People will often ask for an invoice and then completely ignore the invoice and our followup emails. This makes it hard for us to plan and count on that money.

In 2023 we have and will institute a couple of changes.

1. If you school wants Runestone Academy to sign a contract or data privacy agreement we will invoice the school for $100.

2. During the first part of the year we will be working on determining a small set of features will will require payment. None of the paid for features would prevent you from using Runestone for free. These are all features that are nice to have, but provide good backup for why you could pay to support Runestone. I know that many public schools have policies that don’t allow you to “donate” so by providing a few features that you can only use if you pay turns that donation into a fee for service.

Runestone Academy is not a big corporation. The two employees mentioned are myself and my wife. As I made clear above, Runestone is powered by volunteers. The Runestone community has accomplished a LOT on very little over the last 10 years. The challenge is to sustain that progress and spirit in an ever changing world.

Conclusions

This past fall I ran a survey for the instructors who use Runestone Academy, I learned a lot from the survey that will help us set a course to smooth out some of the rough edges of the Runestone platform. But even more than that was the outpouring of support for the mission. So many people have come to rely on using Runestone Academy in their classrooms every day, and so many people said that love it! That kind of feedback is really energizing and makes me want to work hard to keep building and improving things.

Our mission is expanding, Democratizing textbooks for the 21st century is only part of what we do now. An updated mission statement might read as follows:

>To enable authors and researchers to maximize the accessibility of open educational resources for learners, and advance the teaching of STEM fields.

As with any mission statement it needs a bit of unpacking. Accessibility is the practice of making information, activities, and/or environments sensible, meaningful, and usable for as many people as possible. And the goal is to create a virtuous circle of feedback that drives progress for our four major stakeholders: learners, researchers, authors, and teachers.

It is worth repeating… we can use your help! If you or your school can join the project by supporting us financially that would be awesome. But beyond that we want YOU to become an active participant in our community in any of the ways I mentioned above.

Features you Value

The following graph summarizes the responses to the first four questions. Recall that 1 is least important and 5 is most important.

I was a little surprised by how many instructors said that LTI was really not important, nearly 50% of respondents rated the importance of LTI a 1. Assignments and grading, practice, and tracking student progress were rated a 4 or 5 by 60% That reaffirms that these are our core features that you rely on. Although reading through the open text response it is clear that we can make the assignment and grading pages much better. I’ve started a redesign of those in my head, but I would love to hear from you on what exactly the pain points for you are. I heard words like clunky, cumbersome, difficult, and those are somewhat helpful but some detail would sure help.

The thing that made me the most happy was the overall satisfaction score with over 90% of the responses rating us a 4 or 5! There were so many nice comments in the text section that I will read again and again on the days when I am slogging through the code trying to fix some obscure bug!

Features you Might be Willing to Pay for

I know the question was a big vague, and I think think that it led to some unnecessary panic by some of the respondents. What is clear to me is that there is a section of our user base that values Runestone Academy and would like support us. There is also a sizable number that come from school districts that would not have the budget to support us even though you might want to. This latter group is why Runestone exists, we exist to serve you and we want to be here for you. Recall that 1 is least likely to pay and 5 is most likely. Here is the summary graph:

A couple of things people are clearly not interested in paying for: early access to features, dedicated email support, LTI. But about 20% of respondents would be willing/able to pay for a support fee, access to the student progress features, the practice feature, assignments and grading, PDF copies of the books, and even LTI. Because I’m kind of a nerd I made a correlation matrix:

This does show some interesting correlations that may suggest a way forward. First there is a 0.5 correlation between those who value the practice feature and those that would be willing to pay for it. This is also true of LTI at 0.42. Assignments and Grading and Student progress are at around 0.3. I think it is kind of cool that satisfaction is not correlated with anything. One might hypothesize that the more satisfied you are the more you are willing to pay. But it is probably just be that because 90% of the responses were very satisfied that there is not much to correlate with.

Contracts and Privacy

I have written about this a lot in the past. Processing these contracts that schools want me to sign is a major time sync and a terrible use of my time. Nearly all of them require Runestone to promise to reimburse the school for costs associated with a data breach! For a service they are not paying for! Is it reasonable to charge schools a $100 fee to process these? As the following graph shows the overwhelming majority 85% feel it is fair.

I would love to hear the reasoning of why 5% of the responses do not think a $100 fee is reasonable. I suppose you might think that I should trust your school. They are not out to get me, just to protect their students. But that is no way to run a business. More and more I have become convinced that Runestone Academy needs to have a Cyber insurance policy. I am happy to say that after an extensive search and a LOT of back and forth with underwriters we have finally obtained a policy. But, guess what… They don’t give those policies away for free, they charge a substantial premium that adds to the cost of running Runestone.

Thoughts on the Future

I want to start this section by reminding everyone of why Runestone Academy exists. We exist so that we can make high quality, accessible textbooks available to students no matter their economic situation or physical limitation. Too many students do poorly because they cannot afford (and therefore do not buy) the textbooks they need for class. We exist to provide students engaging books that help them learn more effectively than paper books. We exist to help teachers teach more effectively by providing them feedback about their students. We exist to help authors and researchers do their jobs more effectively by providing a system where they can experiment with new pedagogical techniques and new technology for textbooks. You will notice that not once in that list of reasons we exist did I mention the word profit or money. Making money is not why we exist. The materials we provide will always be free to students.

Yet the hard facts of the world are that nothing is for free. We have hosting fees and legal fees and credit card fees and paypal fees in 2021 we had about $28,000 in fees. That is before I even try to pay myself a salary for working on this full time. What happens if I disappear? Is there someone else willing to devote full time to keeping Runestone running for little or no pay? I haven’t met anyone yet, which means we have to get to the point where we can pay someone and keep Runestone sustainable.

There are a few immediate decisions from the results of the survey.

1. Runestone books will continue to be free to all students. We will not charge the students for access to our books.

2. For all schools with courses beginning after January 1 2023 that want Runestone to sign a contract we will require a $100 contract fee. If your school cannot afford that fee we have options for you to continue using Runestone without a contract.

3. I think that there is room for a “freemium model” to work. We will work on defining a set of features that will remain free to everyone, for example assignments, grading, and student progress remain free but features like LTI integration, practice and peer instruction may cost a small fee. I am being transparent about this because I don’t want people to panic, I want to open a dialog to get your feedback and I want to reassure everyone that if we do have to charge for some features you will get plenty of notice. I also want to reassure you that we will do everything we can to find grant money so that everyone who wants to use any book on Runestone Academy can continue to do so regardless of the financial position of the school.

We say PROSE

Our proposal which we called the PreTeXt – Runestone Open Source Ecosystem (PROSE) says the following:

We propose an Open-Source Ecosystem (OSE) which will support such a community. This is timely because software for creating OER is just reaching a mature state, in particular, PreTeXt for authoring, and Runestone for publishing. The governing organization for this OSE, which we will call the PreTeXt-Runestone OSE (PROSE), will be built upon the following principles.

1. Students and instructors should have no-cost access to high-quality OER that supports STEM learning without the equity issues inherent in for-profit educational publishing.

2. Authors should have a no-cost mechanism for creating high-quality and accessible OER that is not locked into one specific format or vendor.

3. Authors should have a no-cost mechanism for disseminating their OER as part of fully- featured courseware that provides rich usage and learning analytics for students and instructors.

4. Researchers, authors, and instructors should have access to high-quality student data to inform research and development efforts related to OER, and improve student learning.

5. OER must be accessible to everyone, regardless of background, demographic, or disability.

I like to think of these things in terms of a virtuous circle of improvement. Educational Research makes good Open Educational Resources better, which in turn helps teachers teach more effectively, which improves student learning, which drives even more interesting educational research…

This way of thinking is part of the DNA of both the PreTeXt and Runestone projects since their earliest days. Every time we add a new feature and study how it effects students and teachers we learn something new! New knowledge inspires new ideas for new features. My TODO list has never run low in over a decade of working on the project, and in fact it is longer today than ever. Recently I’ve had to admit to myself that the list is too long. There is too much to do and Runestone Academy has grown so much that it is more than one person can manage. More than that, is the feeling that we are on the cusp of something disruptive, transformative, and sustainable. That is why this grant is so important and timely.

How you can help?

Over the next months we will be hosting a series of online discussions around areas where we need help. Everything from cybersecurity and dev-ops to community building and training. We invite you to participate in these discussions to share your ideas. We also invite you to consider if there is an area of interest where you can actively participate and contribute some time to the project. Both Runestone and PreTeXt have operated on a BDFL model. That is Rob and I act as Benevolent Dictators for Life. In order to grow and ensure that these projects are sustainable we must move beyond the BDFL modus operandi to become community driven. Check out the calendar of events and sign up on our new PROSE Website

We have many questions to answer in the coming months:

1. What will the PreTeXt / Runestone ecosystem look like in 5 years? 10 years?

2. How do we transition from our current organization(s) to a community driven model?

3. Is our goal to be the preeminent publisher of online textbooks for STEM or are we more focused on being a catalyst for change by serving the research community or both?

4. How do we fund an organization like ours to provide stability for the future? How do we retain the ability to support teachers and students yet pay for support staff and servers?

5. What organizations can we partner with to facilitate future growth and provide mutual benefits?

6. How can we recruit new authors? Particularly authors in STEM fields outside of mathematics and computer science?

At the end of all this process we will have the opportunity to submit a Phase II grant to help us achieve the goals we will have set. The POSE program is a wonderful opportunity for a project like ours, but it will only achieve its full potential if we can convince people like you to join us in making it a success.

PROSE is supported by NSF Award #2230153.

SQL

The chapters on SQL (part 1 of the book) take full advantage of the Runestone platform to provide live, interactive examples with a real database.  Students can see the examples in action, test themselves on the challenge questions, and experiment with querying the provided tables.  As the database is an in-memory copy that is replaced whenever the browser page refreshes, students can freely try out data modification and DDL statements.

For students or instructors who wish to use something other than the SQLite engine built into Runestone (perhaps wanting more persistence), scripts are provided to create the book’s database in PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server.  The text also gives appropriate guidance for these systems where they differ from the SQL used in the book’s examples; an appendix provides a SQL reference that similarly supports these systems.

SQL coverage includes: basic SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE; joins (both explicit and implicit); data types and DDL (CREATE TABLE); keys & constraints; subqueries; grouping and aggregation; and set operations.  The chapter on joins includes coverage of one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships and their typical implementations (e.g., cross-reference tables).  There is also a very brief explanation of views, CTEs, and window functions.

Data modeling and theory

Part 2 of the book covers ERD (Chen notation) and translation of the ERD into a relational database, with a complete worked example.  Crow’s foot notation and other alternatives are also covered.

The third part of the book covers the relational model, relational algebra, and normalization (through 4NF), and has a short chapter on the differences between the relational model in theory and as implemented in SQL.

Future work

Future releases are planned, covering software programming with databases, NoSQL, and other topics of practical interest, and some expansion of existing topics.  The book is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.  The github repo is public (https://github.com/cpainterwakefield/practical_db_textbook), please feel free to fork and adapt as per the license terms.  Suggestions, corrections, and pull requests are all welcome!

Christopher Painter-Wakefield, Colorado School of Mines cpainter@mines.edu

Who is not affected?

Secondary schools will continue to pay $100 per course. We appreciate that it is generally more difficult for secondary school faculty to get expenses approved.

Also, if your institution has many courses each term/semester, the hosting fees are effectively not going up.

OK, what is the new fee structure?

• Secondary (and primary) institutions: $100 per course

• Higher ed: $120 per course. But every 6th course is free. For example, 13 courses would come to $1320.

The 6th course discount for higher ed applies at the time of invoicing. So for example there is no discount for ordering 4 courses in the Fall and then 4 more in the Spring. But you are welcome to preorder courses for a future term/semester, as long as it’s not more than 8 months in advance. Since this hosting service is only promised annually, we can’t accept orders too far into the future.

How long will it be until it could go up again?

We will stick with this through the 22/23 and 23/24 academic years and reassess at that time. Who knows, if there are more subscriptions or public funding, we could even reduce the cost.

-Alex

The PreTeXt Runestone Partnership

After spending an entire global pandemic working on integration Rob Beezer and Brad Miller presented the integration of Runestone and PreTeXt. PreTeXt now has the ability to natively author most of the Runestone Interactive exercises including multiple choice, Parsons problems, Matching, clickable area, short answer, fill in the blank, activecode, and CodeLens! Rob has built a very nice annotated sample book (alternative link without source annotations) that illustrates these questions in action. Runestone Academy can now host books written in PreTeXt and fully supports using questions written in PreTeXt in our analytics and assignments.

Going forward PreTeXt will be the primary authoring language for books hosted on Runestone Academy. We will continue to research and develop new interactive components but we will not have to worry about inventing markup. If you are a current Runestone author I think you will really like the consistency and expressiveness of PreTeXt. It may take a bit to get used to the more verbose XML style of writing, but is well worth learning for future development. There are many advantages to using PreTeXt as an authoring language.

• PreTeXt books are highly accessible

• PreTeXt books that are interactive on the web can also be rendered in various static forms including pdf, ePub, Kindle, Braille, and more. We make two types of PDF, one is meant specifically for print/print-on-demand. If you want a bound copy of a book, you can get it!

• PreTeXt books are highly structured, which will allow for more customization in the future. We spent a lot of time during the workshop talking about various ways we can make the textbooks more customizable.

One big topic of discussion at this workshop is how to grow the PreTeXt Runestone ecosystem. With our combined forces we need to do more in the following areas:

• Developing champions for each textbook to develop community around each textbook.

• Developing instructor materials for each book

• Improving videos

• Doing more blogging

• Creating a new home page for Runestone Academy that is more informative about what we are.

• Being visible at conferences and workshops.

New Titles Coming to Runestone Academy

Starting this summer we are converting many of our current books to use the PreTeXt markup language. The first of these is also the first textbook to be converted to Runestone. How to Think like a Computer Scientist: Interactive edition. We are finalizing the conversion, but I encourage you to take a look at what we have done so far on our development server I am super excited to see this all come together and you will see many other textbooks undergoing the conversion soon. In addition we will have a lot of other new titles available for the Fall.

• Ordinary Differential Equations

• Discrete Math: an Open Introduction

• Active Calculus

• Apex Calculus

• Elementary Algebra

• Intermediate Algebra: Functions and Graphs

• Trigonometry

I am also pleased to announce that the classic Java Java Java: Object Oriented Problem Solving textbook is now available. Although this textbook was originally authored in LaTeX we have the scripts to convert to PreTeXt. If you have a open source textbook in LaTeX or practically any other format we can convert it to PreTeXt just like this one. Of course the conversion is only part of the work. What we talked a lot about at the workshop is how interactive textbooks that support active learning are structured quite differently than a traditional book. Our research shows that students jump straight to the questions or activities and only come back to read the text when they don’t understand the material. This makes for much more engaged readers.

New Features

One of the features of the workshop was a sharing of a lot of research done by the PreTeXt team as part of the UTMOST project sponsored by NSF. We also got a demo of a new feature of Runestone Academy that allows you to do Peer Instruction in your classroom. This peer instruction feature was the focus of the second workshop the week of June 27.

For Runestone authors it is also exciting to know that Sage and the R language are both supported natively by PreTeXt.

Starting a new book

It is easy to get started writing a book with PreTeXt using the PreTeXt command line tool. This tool allows you to quickly start a book, build books, and see updates to your book as you write. In addition there is also a great extension for Visual Studio Code!

We are working on an editor designed specifically for PreTeXt that will make it super easy for anyone to edit a PreTeXt textbook, more on that another day.

The future

One of the biggest goals for both PreTeXt and Runestone is to ensure that these projects thrive for many years into the future. This means growing the combined team, finding funding and many other things. If you are interested in getting involved in any way we would love to have you join the team. You don’t need to be an expert coder, you don’t even need to know how to code at all. We need willing proof readers, editors, testers of new features, community builders, bloggers, and authors. You don’t need to be a mathematician or a computer scientist either, great open source textbooks are a benefit to students studying any topic!

PreTeXt

PreTeXt is now the official authoring language for Runestone. There are a host of reasons why this makes sense, and I’ve written about them before. It has taken some time but we have finally arrived in a place where it is a reality. I have converted our first Runestone book ever How to Think Like a Computer Scientist to PreTeXt and Rob Beezer has added markup to support our interactive elements. This is a huge step forward and we now begin a process of converting our current books. Like any conversion process it is not 100% so each book is going to take some manual work to perfect the conversion.

• select questions

• toggle questions + A/B testing

  • I think the correct way to do this moving forward is to make toggles tasks and have Runestone show the tasks as dropdown

• Convert select books to PreTeXt for Fall 2022

• Build APEX Calculus for Runestone

• Build ORCCA for Runestone

• Build Yoshiwara’s Algebra book for Runestone

• Finish up the SAGE Cell integration

• Jaas - Jing as a service - Jing is a validator for PreTeXt

• Make a PR to store traces with a hash of the input.

Peer + Grant Work

This work is funded by an NSF Grant for Barb Ericson at the University of Michigan.

• Grading - 2 interaction Qs plus chat (maybe) - update autograder

• Add async peer instruction page

• Get tags working with question bank searching - what we really want is prereqs and reqs - add to web UI and make use of some taxonomy - someone please give me a taxonomy!

Automatically Create Parsons problems

This work is also funded by an NSF Grant for Barb Ericson!

• Get Overcode working in python3 - this may also be a good task for Celery

• Generate parson’s problems from the selected

Github Integration for Custom books

This work is funded by a grant from Elliot Houser and UT Austin.

• Add simple interface to connect a Repository

• Add simple interface to publish draft/published

• Integrate the web hooks to auto build when pushed - this may be a separate server

Runestone Internal Projects

• Updates to student progress page - replacing d3 stuff with pandas

• Allow instructors to download LARGE classes on their own - using a celery task with an email followup - maybe create a special role for trusted teachers / researchers to allow them access

  • celery could also be used to do build on demand of Runestone / PreTeXt books

• Finish redoing the login process

• prototype an author/researcher dashboard

• Convert other books

• Does PreTeXt support hidden pages? Somehow we will need a workaround for how barb has been adding problems to the database but not on a page that is linked to a TOC

• Create a bibtex file with references and generate a web page of references from that.

Why the change?

The reason for the change is really quite simple. We want to keep Runestone free for all students. Period, end of story.

However, the reality is a bit different. In an ideal world every school that used Runestone would send us $10 per student. This would allow us to hire support staff and incentivise new authors to add more books to runestone for very little cost to the school and no cost to the students. But that does not happen. I know that many school districts do not have big budgets, and my goal has never been to “get rich from Runestone.” Don’t even get me started about the legal fees we would have to pay to have the “contracts” from school districts reviewed!!!

But We have big goals! I would love to see Runestone helping two million students a day instead of fifty thousand. To do that we need more authors, more books, more servers, more support people, and more programmers! I am greatful to all of the schools and teachers that send us support! Although I feel bad about teachers that send me money from their own pocket! I am from and education family and I know how little teachers at public schools and small colleges make!

So, what to do?

The more I researched this problem the more convinced I became that Runestone had to become a non-proft. This opens the door for us at many corporate and family foundations that care deeply about STEM education. We have several grant applications outstanding, but like everything else, this is a process. New groups have to prove themsevles, and that takes time. In the meantime we will be rolling out new programs that make it possible for individuals or schools to help us financially. More about that soon.

If your students are having trouble

1. Logout - clear browsing history, and log in.

2. Try incogito mode

3. Open up the Javascript console on their browser and send me everything! No detail is too small. And Its not your fault! at this point I am trying my best to debug the odd cases. I am even willing to do a zoom with you and your students to debug the problem.

I cannot emphasize how useful it is to do #3! So much of what happens in Runestone is delegated to the browser. If we did not delegate this work to the browser we could never scale to as many students as we have!

Thanks for sticking with us through this transition. Major shifts like this are always painful, and I know we are not through yet. But this new architecture sets us up for a very bright future!

A Few Details

For those that are interested, this change is pretty big. Here is what Runestone has looked like in the past:

Runestone.academy runs the web2py application server as well as the database server (postgresql). This server has been in service since 2017. I haven’t had to reboot it for 695 days as of this writing! It is definitely showing its age, and can definitely not keep up with all of the traffic. Our stopgap measure to alleviate the pressure on this machine was to add csawesome.runestone.academy and route all traffic for the csawesome book to that server. It still used the database on academy. And it used most of the cpu power of the five jobe servers that compile over 100,000 Java programs each day. If it looks like this is a “Rube Goldberg” contraption its because it is.

For years we have wanted to move to a new architecture. And this change is our first step in that direction. This new architecture is all based around Docker containers and gives us the ability to add more capacity in just minutes. It will also let us scale back during the less busy summer months, thus saving us money as well.

All traffic will now go to runestone.academy. It will be routed to one of N docker containers that run the old server which is now just for the instructor dashboard. Page requests for books will be handled by our brand new bookserver. This new server is built using a very modern web framework and will have a ton of benefits for developing new features going forward. Each container also houses a JOBE server for handling java and other compiled languages not supported in the browser.

Warning

Any big change like this is bound to come with some setbacks. I’m sure there are things around the edges and in the corners of our new server that will break over the first couple of months. Please be patient, and please please report problems on our github issues page Don’t assume that someone else will report a problem or that it is your own fault.

It will also take us some time to tweak the performance of this new setup. We have had almost five years to squeeze as much performance out of the old system as we could. It will take some time to get the most out of this new one as well. So again please be patient and let us know of any particular bottlenecks.

Please Support Runestone

As long as I have your attention, and we are at that end of the year time when we think about supporting the organizations that matter to us, please consider a small donation to keep runestone solvent. You can donate directly on PayPal Thanks!

Enjoy the holidays!

Brad

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

An Open Letter

Dear School Districts,

I run Runestone Academy as a “labor of love.” For me it is a great way of paying back all those who have helped me be successful over the years. The mission of Runestone is to democratize textbooks for the 21st century. One implication of that mission is that everyone who wants to learn computer science should have access to free, high quality materials.

I’m not trying to turn Runestone into a major corporation or even make a profit. If I can run it as a small business that keeps me from becoming a greeter at Wal-Mart that is even better! I’m perfectly transparent about the finances, please take the time to read about that in our Annual Report It also does a nice job of clarifying our mission.

Districts, you are driving me crazy with your student data privacy agreements! Do you even understand what you are asking for? I understand that you must follow laws that have been thrust upon you by your well meaning state legislators, I understand that student data privacy is a good thing. I understand that you don’t want some corporation making money by selling your students PII for fun and profit. I agree! Read my Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service We are on the same side.

But here is the problem:

1. As a free and open source project we don’t have lawyers, nor do we have the budget to pay for them as needed. I am definitely not a lawyer, and frankly Its very risky for me to spend my time pretending to be one to read your agreements.

2. As a free and open source project I work on this because I love to write educational materials that help students learn and I love to code systems like Runestone that help you and your students teach and learn more effectively. This does not include spending my time filling out attachements A, B, C and H of yet another data privacy agreement.

3. As a free and open source project we don’t have any money to promise to reimburse you for anything if something goes wrong.

4. Approximately every district in every state has a different agreement!

As a professor of 15 years I am very aware of FERPA and all that it entails. But seriously here is what I am asked to agree to on a regular basis. This is taken directly from contract sent to me by a school district like yours.

The Contractor warrants that the service it will provide to District is fully compliant with the following regulations:

• Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA)

• Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS)

• Student Data Privacy Pledge

And any changes to the preceding that may occur from time to time.

The vendor hosting data center meets the following standards (proof must be provided if PII is stored at rest in the vendor’s data center):

• ISO27001:2005

• SOC2

• SSAE 18

Sometimes I swear you and your lawyers just Google everything related to privacy and add it to a laundry list for us to figure out. Honestly what does HIPPA have to do with computer science? I asked a lawyer friend about HIPPA compliance and he laughed and said that only a handful of people in the country even know what that means.

As a non-lawyer computer scientist I have learned some heuristics that help me weed through these agreements in record time. All I need to do is search for the words “indemnify” and “reimburse” as in:

• If requested by the District, Provider shall reimburse District for costs incurred to notify parents/families of a breach not originating from District’s use of the Service.

• The Provider shall indemnify and hold harmless the District from and against any loss, claim, cost (including attorneys’ fees) or damage of any nature arising from or in connection with the breach by the Provider or any of its officers, directors, employees, agents or representatives of the obligations of the Provider’s or its Authorized Representatives under this provision or under a Confidentiality Agreement, as the case may be.

Really!? If Equifax, major banks, and pipeline companies cannot always prevent hacks! How are we supposed to be any better? We do our best, try to follow good practices and take all reasonable precautions, but you now want me to promise to pay you back for a service that you are using for FREE. If I find a clause like that I will ask you to remove it. I simply cannot enter into a contract that obligates Runestone to pay you back.

Trying to guilt me into signing something will not work. “If you don’t sign this then our students will not be able to use your materials.” Yes I want your students to use the materials, its why I do this, but I don’t make anything from your students, Its not like a for profit corporation where if I don’t sign you don’t pay me. In fact every district that uses Runestone just adds to the costs of running Runestone. More students means more servers means more money we have to pay to keep running the service. I am not going to put the project at risk just to make your lawyers happy.

Every minute I spend trying to deal with your red tape is a minute a don’t get to spend making Runestone better or writing new materials to help your students learn.

Solutions

First, everything on Runestone is open source and free for you to use however you see fit. This includes every book and the Runestone server that supports it! This allows for several solutions.

1. You can run your own Runestone Server and serve any of the books you want on your very own server. This totally eliminates the need for you to use Runestone Academy and keeps you 100% in control of your students data. This was actually the model I envisioned for Runestone in the beginning, but I quickly learned that many people do not have the time or the skill to maintain their own server, and so to help those people Runestone Academy was born. No good deed goes unpunished as they say.

2. You and your students can read and use any and all of the books on Runestone Academy without creating an account. Ok, yes this makes life a lot harder for teachers to gather their students homework and grade it, but it is 100% an option. I am not trying to force anyone to create an account so I can gather PII to sell!

3. You could agree to send Runestone some money so that I can have your agreement properly reviewed by a lawyer at around $350 / hour. Lets call it $1200. In that case I would be happy to agree to refund that entire $1200 as reimbursement for a data breach. I’m happy to put that in writing and send you an invoice.

4. You, as a teacher, can register all of your students anonymously with NO PII. See this post for instructions on how to do this. I would be happy if everyone who sent me contract would just do this instead. I have no interest in knowing anything about your students, the only reason I collect names and email addresses is to deal with password resets and to make life easier for instructors when they are grading assignments. This solution makes it a bit less convenient, but does so without any PII.

In the back of my head I have an addition to Runestone that would allow everyone to use option 4, but allow instructors to keep a mapping in their browser (NOT on Runestone) that would let them see who the anonymous students really are. That is just a gleam in my eye at this point, no code has been written, so please don’t ask when it will be ready.

We Are in this Together

I firmly believe that our goals are aligned! I want to provide great free resources to help students learn, and you as school districts with limited budgets want to use great free resources to help your students learn. I am not the enemy! I have signed the student data privacy pledge, I have published a privacy policy. I sincerely care about student privacy!

But, I believe these laws put projects like Runestone at a real disadvantage. We do not have the resources to hire lawyers to review and negotiate all of these contracts. We are not big enough to make you sign our own. So we need to work together and treat each other with respect and maybe engage in a little give an take. It is a win win! If you don’t use Runestone are you going to pay a big publisher $100 per student every semester?

If you have other suggestions for how we can make this work please feel free to reach out to me, I am open to hearing ideas and working on alternatives that do not create more legal hassle for any of us!

Thanks for reading!

Sincerely,

Brad Miller

Professor Emeritus, Luther College

Founder, Runestone Interactive

Roadmap Overview

BookServer

Although the web2py framework has served us well since 2011, I have wanted for a long time to rewrite the core book server in Runestone using modern web frameworks and technologies. This will allow us to scale Runestone more elegantly and save us money as well! The Instructor interface, which gets 10% of the traffic that the book server does will stay on web2py until I or someone else finds the time to port it as well. They will continue to work together just fine as they will share a common database. The BookServer project is using a fully async framework called FastAPI as well as SQLAlchemy for the database work. It will be tightly integrated with the Runestone Components so that you can easily spin up a server to serve a Runestone book on your own infrastructure, With access to all your data in a sqlite database. Production on Runestone Academy or another large installation will still use Postgresql. This is the highest priority for me at the moment as I don’t want to do any further student facing development on the old server.

Funded Projects

There are several high priority projects that are being funded by NSF money through colleagues like Barbara Ericson at the University of Michigan, or the SPLICE project. Others may be on the way…

Smaller Projects

Blockly on Runestone

Thanks to the authors of the amazing Mobile CSP curriculum and book (coming to Runestone for Fall 2021) and the hard work of Ralph Morelli we will have a great addition to the runestone library, and the ability to use blockly in your textbooks. I think this is awesome for beginners and I’ve always wanted to update The How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (HTTLACS) book to illustrate each new programming construct in Blockly first. I think this is a really cool way to give students a visual understanding of loops and conditionals before they see the syntax.

As is usually the case with all things Runestone we start small, and then iterate, so if you are into blockly and would like to help evolve this new component (which goes by quizly in the source) we would love to have your help.

Fixing Bugs and Even Smaller Projects

Many small coding projects are available on Runestone and are identified as issues. These issues are all typically tagged with the “Good First Issue” and or “Help Wanted” tags. I try to identify these projects this way because they are good starter projects that can get you into the Runestone system. See

• Runestone Server Projects - Good First Issue

• Runestone Component Projects - Good First Issue

Video Production Anyone?

The YouTube videos that accompany the HTTLACS book are very popular on YouTube, but I consistently get complaints about their resolution. Unfortunately the original recordings are 8 years old at least, and have been lost through many migrations of computers. They also feature version 0.1 of Runestone so that pages don’t match at all anymore. My new years resolution for 2021 was to work on one of these a week. So far we are at week 17 of 2021 and I have redone exactly 0 videos. If you would like to try your hand at re-recording any of these I would love it! You can just take the transcript of an existing video and work your way through it.

How You Can Help

Runestone is an Open Source project. Everything on Runestone is freely available as part of our Github Organization. Summer may be a good time for you to help hack on something, test something, or write something! I would be happy to have help on any and all projects. Funded or not it does not matter to me. I only point out the funded projects to show how awesome it is that some big partners have put their faith and money behind Runestone to keep it sustainable.

You do not have to be an expert coder to help out. We welcome people of all abilities to our community and would be grateful for your help.

Another way you can provide coding help to Runestone is to consider us as an option for a student capstone project. We have had great success in working with students at Berea college and other colleges that have adopted Runestone for their capstone course. Many of the projects identified above would be great as capstone projects for a group of students. The students really love, especially if they have benefitted from using a Runestone book as part of their education. This is a pathway for them to give back to a project that has helped them.

Another way you can help is to talk to encourage your department to budget some money to help support Runestone. I’ve heard from a number of instructors this spring asking about this, and I’m very grateful. We are happy to send an invoice for whatever amount you decide. Other departments have decided to charge a lab fee of $10.00 for the course, and have designated part or all of the per student lab fee to go to Runestone. We are happy to work with you on billing and payment!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Module One - Runestone Student Experience

• Introduction

  • goals for the workshop

  • history of Runestone

• Be a student

  • enroll in course

  • check out your first assignment - reading assignment

  • checkout your second assignment - problem set

  • Using the Practice Tool

Module Two - Teacher Experience Creating a course

• Creating a course (base course versus bespoke course)

• Student Management

  • Enrolling and dropping students

  • Adding a TA

• Monitoring Student Progress

• Instructor only features of the textbooks

• Setting up practice

Module Three - Creating your own Assignments Writing and Customizing

• Creating assignments and questions

• Making assignments

  • Reading Assignments

  • Problem Sets

• Grading assignments

  • Using the autograder

  • Manually grading

• Editor Role and flagging bad questions

Module Four - Stories from the Instructor Community

• Discussion with guest instructors

• Creating a community of practice

For Authors

1. jUnit is now support for writing auto grade-able Java questions

2. catch.hpp is now supported for writing auto grade-able C++ questions

3. The python tutor support is upgraded to the latest version and supports writing embedded visualizations for Python, C, C++ and Java

4. Skulpt – our in-browser version of Python supports all Python 3 syntax and lot more of Python3! f-strings are even supported now! This will provide students with a much more consistent experience when moving

5. .. datafile:: – if you need data for your program or auxiliary cpp or java files for your programs you should use the datafile directive to provide them. This will ensure that these files are available anywhere in the book, including assignments and the grading interface.

6. There is a video now that walks you through the process of getting runestone installed and ready to go if you want to write your own content.

For Instructors

1. The Runestone instructor interface has accumulated a lot of great changes in the last 9 months. I attribute many of these changes to wonderful discussions I have had with teachers on the CSAwesome mailing list.

2. I have set up Google Groups for each book, with the goal of using these groups to develop communities of practice around each book. There is a lot we can all learn from each other and share with each other. These groups will also serve as the gatekeeper for access to instructor-only materials. In particular both FOPP and HTTLADS have very highly developed instructor manuals now.

Summer is a great time to get involved

We have a lot of projects in the pipeline for this summer! Including lots of great new content for you to use this Fall. Here are some links to help you get started.

• Installing the Runestone Components and building starter book

• Installing the Runestone Server with Docker

• A quick intro to a Docker/Runestone Workflow

We can use help writing unit tests for exercises, editing exercises, adding new features, whatever your interest there is sure to be a project for the common good that you can get involved with. You don’t need to be an expert, none of us were when we started, and we are happy to help get you up and running.

Setting up a class with no PII

We will walk through two strategies for managing a Runestone Course that doesn’t store any PII about a student. The first strategy has the students register themselves following the instructions I’ll tell you about. The second strategy puts you in complete control and allows you to create all of the usernames for your students!

The way to use Runestone without PII is to ensure that your students choose a username that they remember but has nothing to do with their real identity. They can also put in fake first names and last names.

The real trick is how to manage password recovery Thats where this cool email alias trick comes in. Most email systems (including gmail) support the username+alias convention. That is you can add a + and an additional alias to your email address. For example runestone+support@gmail.com or runestone+info@gmail.com both of those emails will end up in the runestone mailbox, but I can also see the alias. We can use this feature so that students don’t have to enter their real email address, they enter yours plus their username as the alias. This means that you will end up fielding the password reset emails. If you are an email whiz you can set up some rules to forward these to the right student.

Experience has shown that having students register themselves and get all of those pieces correct is a losing battle. So why not put you in charge of registering them? Get out your favorite spreadsheet app and prepare a file with your students information.

You can upload a CSV file with the following format: One row for each student

username,email,first_name,last_name,password,course

In order to protect your students privacy you can create a spreadsheet like the following:

hogwarts-1,dumbledore+hogwarts1@gmail.com,F1,L1,owls4all,potions_fall19
hogwarts-2,dumbledore+hogwarts1@gmail.com,F2,L2,owls4all,potions_fall19
hogwarts-3,dumbledore+hogwarts1@gmail.com,F2,L2,owls4all,potions_fall19

From the Manage Students tab on the Instructor’s Page, you can now upload this CSV file using the interface.

Once you have uploaded the CSV, you can add some columns to the spreadsheet that contain the real student information to help you remember. You will probably learn quickly who your made up names correspond to, and can probably think of something anonymous that will help you remember who F1 L1 really is. On the first day of class you may want to hand out paper for the students with their username, and walk them through changing the password, or maybe you want to assign each student a unique password when you are making up the spreadsheet. I just would not recommend a scenario where all the students have the same password.

Of course all of this is optional. You can also create a csv file with usernames of your choice and include the real email addresses and real first / last names of your students, or you can have them register themselves as students have been doing on Runestone since 2012.

Password and Account Management

There is no doubt about it, password management is a headache for everyone. Runestone handles hundreds of password reset requests each week. But that does not always work. Some schools (inexplicably) block email from Runestone. Other schools run software that simply mangles the URL’s found in emails that look like they are password reset emails. This is understandable to some degree as Phishing scams are so common, and its important to protect the students. I’ve done everything I can do from my side to validate the runestone.academy email domain. But, other times students simply type in their email incorrectly.

When the email system for password resets do not work, I have now given instructors the ability to change the passwords for the students in their class. Hopefully, this will eliminate the emails asking me to manually reset passwords when the reset emails are now flowing. Runestone has gotten too big for me to deal with these requests, and I don’t have any minions for that.

Instructors cannot change their own passwords through this mechanism. who among us hasn’t walked away from the computer and left ourselves logged into Runestone? As an instructor, you will still have to use the normal email password reset mechanism. If your school blocks emails then I suggest you just get a free gmail address to use for this purpose.

One final note on account management. When you use the Remove Student button, you are not actually deleting the student. What I do is move the student out of your course so they do not clutter your gradebook or Student Progress page. They are moved into the public version of the course you based your own course on. This allows them to keep their username, as well as retrieve any of their work they did. If a student wants to truly delete themselve they do have that capability! From the user menu select edit profile and from there the student can really delete themselves and all of their work.

What other Data Does Runestone Collect

Here is a graph of all of the events that runestone has collected in the last 4 weeks.

As you can see that is a lot of activecode and a lot of pages loaded. Also over 1 million multiple choice questions answered! I would love to see more clickable area questions and more fill in the blanks. Some of our preliminary research shows that those kinds of questions are much more effective at getting students to review the content in order to get a correct answer, rather than simply clicking on different answers until they guess correctly for multiple choice. All of these events are captured and tied to a username. So the more anonymous your username the better as far as I’m concerned.

What I’m really interested in is figuring out how to apply machine learning algorithms to help identify students that may struggle, to help weed out bad questions, to help us write better questions, to help us order the textbook in different ways, to adapt to each student to help them achieve their maximum potential.

Runestone also collects the source code each time your student changes and runs the code in an activecode activity. This is to provide a timeline for the student as well as for yourself.

• Make sure you explain the timeline to your students. Sometimes there is great fear in them about changing code that is working. Having this timeline present encourages them to experiment, knowing that they can always get back to a good working version.

• For you the timeline can be an invaluable tool for talking through an assignment with a student. You can see their progress and if they make a wrong turn you can usually see that in the timeline and talk to them about why they decided to a particular direction.

• The timeline is also available in the scratch activecode which some students like to use as a notebook for the course.

What does a unit test look like?

Here is the ideal submission. (Again, I’ll take much less than this)

from unittest.gui import TestCaseGui

class MyTest(TestCaseGui):

    def test_XXX(self):
        assertEqual(variable, correct_value, feedback)
        assertEqual(function_call(), correct_return_value, feedback)
        ...

myTest.main()

What about problems without functions?

No problem, you can make an assertion that a variable should be equal to a value just as easily as a function. Now, many problems are not stated precisely in the sense that we have not stated clearly. Store the result in “variableX”. That is easily changed as well,and you get the satisfaction of knowing that your variable name will be used by thousands of students.

You can also make assertions about the output as well as the assertions words that appear in the source code.

For example lets say you want to write a unit test to check that the ever popular “hello world” program works. We will use the getOuput() method to grab the output of the program. Its just a string so we can manipulate it and assert that substrings be in the output!

print("Hello World")

====
from unittest.gui import TestCaseGui

class myTests(TestCaseGui):

    def testOne(self):
        self.assertIn("Hello World", self.getOutput(), )

myTests().main()

Note that the ==== tells Runestone to hide the test code following the ==== from the student.

Looking for multiple answers in the output is easy to do with a number of assertions. So, this would be a good strategy for having them try several test cases. Even when using the input function!

Or, lets say you want the students to calculate the total of a list of numbers but you don’t want them to use the sum function, and you want the result to be stored in the variable total. We also have access to the source through the getEditorText method.

numbers = [1, 3, 5, 11, 25]

total = sum(numbers)

====
from unittest.gui import TestCaseGui

class myTests(TestCaseGui):

    def testOne(self):
        self.assertEqual(total, sum(numbers) )
        self.assertNotIn("sum", self.getEditorText(), "Do not use the sum function")

myTests().main()

This would result in:

What if I have already written a unit test for problem xxx?

Even better! Just send me the unique id for the problem you created, and (if you know it) the id for the problem you started with.

I know we are all super busy, but with just a few minutes from each of us we can really make a huge dent in reducing our grading workload. Think about it this way: when you make the assignment, jot down a few ideas about what you are going to look for when the students hand in their work, or even write up the unit tests in an editor. If you get them to me, and we get them into the book before the deadline, all you have to do is make sure your students run them one time with the tests in place and your grading for that problem is done! I think this can pay for itself with a single assignment!

Thanks in advance for your participation!

Brad

Grading

Self Grading Have your students ever complained that they don’t know what they have left to do to complete either a Reading Assignment or a Problem Set? Probably, have you resorted to running the autograder a few days early and releasing grades so that your students can see what they have left to do? Now students can “grade” their own assignments. At least that parts of it that can be automatically graded.

After the student presses the button they will see their scores and progress for every part of the assignment. If they are not getting full credit for a section of the reading, they can click on the link and finish the activities on that page. If they are not getting credit for a programming problem they can continue to work on it until all the unit tests pass. If a problem requires manual grading it will just show a message “Not Yet Graded”.

Multiple Selections: Have you ever wanted to streamline your manual grading by selecting a bunch of students at once and having all of their code visible rather than selecting them one at a time? You can now do that!

Assignments

Not all of us have a good naming convention in mind for our assignments at the beginning of a semester. So, one simple but popular request is to be able to rename assignments. You can do that now.

What can be autograded? When making an assignment, I know this was a bit frustrating. Now the Tree View of the avaialable exercises tells you what kind of thing each question is, AND if there is a checkmark next to it then you know that it will be autograded. Better yet, the system now does a much better job of setting the correct default grading option for you when you add something to an assignment.

Student Progress

Speaking of student progress a little polish has been applied there too. The “donut charts” are now organized by subsection. And the dropdown menu has Chapter Numbers! This makes it a lot easier to guage what is going on in your class at a glance when you can see the donut charts grouped by sub chapter.

Squashing Bugs

We have also squashed a fair number of bugs this summer. Just two days ago I corrected a really annoying grading problem thats been around for 3 years! I’ve also found ways to eliminate (or ignore) the cruft in our database that sometimes throws off the count of exercises for reading assignments! Little by little we are making things better and more reliable. Please do report any problems that you run into. Again preferably on Github That makes it so much easier for us to track.

New Stuff for Instructors and Students

There are several big changes to Runestone that should make life better for instructors this summer.

1. Dynamic Pages – wait, what? I thought Runestone pages were already far from static. You’re right, but you know that course building and rebuilding process you had to go through to create a course? Its gone! We now have a single copy of the most up-to-date version of each textbook that we can serve dynamically for you and your own bespoke course. You won’t really notice anything except that creating a course is now instantaneous, and the URL to your book is now going to be /runestone/books/published/yourbook instead of the old /runestone/static URL.

2. In page progress indicators Reading assignments are awesome, but they do have some potential pitfalls. Such as students doing work in the wrong course, or not understanding what they need to do on each page. So at the bottom of each page we have added a progress bar to show how many of the interactive activities on each page the student has tried.

3. One scratch activecode per book – One thing I learned last year in working more closely with instructors and having more time to listen to students is that most students were confused by the scratch activecode. In the past we had a different scratch activecode for each page for each student. This was confusing as students use these scratch activecode’s a lot, but were often confused about how to find something they were trying on a page somewhere that they could not recall. Now their entire history of all interactions will be available and scrollable through the history slider. Making history searchable is on the todo list somewhere…

4. Navigation menu within the chapter – another request that I’ve heard from many of you is to improve the navigation in the book. There are many different opinions on what is “best” in this area, but the one I like the best, and the one that keeps the book pages the most uncluttered, is to have a “This Chapter” menu in the navbar. This lets you quickly move to any page in your current chapter. If you want to change to a different chapter then you can click on the course name and that will bring you to the table of contents for the whole book. So, closer is one click away, and anything outside the current chapter is two clicks away. That makes sense to me. But I would love to hear feedback on this. Nothing is set in stone.

New Stuff for Authors

1. New activecode language for writing about and working with SQL! Oh yeah, I love SQL! I love writing queries and I love teaching about how to “squeeze information out of a database,” a phrase my masters advisor John Carlis, repeated every day in our databases class. SQL queries are also “autogradeable” with a simle set of asserts. The database engine runs in-browser and is a fully operational version of SQLLite!

2. New Spreadsheets directive When trying to write a data science book last year, it was clear that both SQL and a Spreadsheet in the browser would really help. Now, thanks to the jExcel Project We also have a very functional spreadshet running in the browser. Many many Excel/Sheets functions are supported, and it is also autogradeable through a series of assert statements. In addition, cells that students should be adding formulas to are colored in light blue to start with, and after grading are colored green or red to indicate whether they got it right. In addition there is text that also shows whether each test passed or not, and what the expected value was.

3. New Instructor Only Reveals So many people have asked for instructor materials for all of our books. One of the things the last year of working with Google has helped with is in actually getting some materials written. Its at least as much work as writing the book itself! So how to deliver these new materials? This is one of the first great features of the new dynamic pages model of serving. Buttons that are only included on the page if you are an instructor.

When you click on it the answer or any other helpful material is displayed.

Students will not even see the buttons. In some books these instructor materials will be “paid for” features. You will also need to do an extra level of proof that you are an instructor in order to gain access to these.

Inside Baseball

1. Unit testing means better reliability and more agile development. We have invested a lot of time this summer in getting a good unit testing framework set up for the Runestone server. I’ve spent some portion of each day writing one or more unit tests. For the functionality required to serve books and collect data reliably we now have excellent test coverage. Not as good for some of the instructor supporting pages, but we are working on it, and they get a lot less traffic than the book pages. I’ve also done a lot of load testing on this new architecture and it seems that it should hold up quite well.

2. New dynamic architecture for more dynamic features in the future. In addition, the new dynamic architecture changes how we check that login/logout is handled. This should help with making sure that students are always in the course they should be in, rather than some random course they found with a Google search.

3. http://interactivepython.org is gone. Well its not really gone, it has a permanent redirect to https://runestone.academy. None of the old classes on interactivepython.org made the move. Registrations have been disabled for a year. This move has been coming for two years, so hopefully it doesn’t surprise anyone.

4. Both RunestoneComponents and RunestoneServer are running Python3. We had to keep Python2.7 a lot longer than I would have liked due to the web2py framework, but happily web2py now fully supports Python 3.7. I look forward to simplifying and dropping support for 2.7 once all this new stuff is live on academy.

Caveats

That is a LOT of change! And, I plan to deploy all of these new features over the next week. Even with all of the testing we have done there is bound to be something we have missed that will break something. Please be patient, and please report it on our GitHub page!

1. If you have an existing course, in progress, on Runestone Academy that course should continue to work just fine. You will not be able to rebuild it as that functionality is gone.

2. Newly created courses will use the new dynamic pages feature. This means you don’t need to rebuild, you will automatically get updates that fix typos or squash bugs.

3. I’m introducing these changes during our summer “downtime” although I fully realize that our summer downtime is now busier than our peak traffic the first couple of years! This means that by the time classes start for people in the Northern Hemisphere in late august – the majority of our users – things should be in good shape.

So - Which Runestone Book(s)?

The introductory courses I have usually taught over the past several years in my department are taught in the Python programming language. I’ve used a couple different versions of course materials over the years, but for the purposes of this explanation, I’ll examine a case where I choose Foundations of Python Programming as the course textbook.

I’ve also used selections at times from other Runestone materials, which is a nice backup for a time that one book has, say, 98% of what I want.

Why Runestone?

A primary highlight of selecting a Runestone-based textbook as my course textbook is the stability it offers my class, on a few different axes, and this is why I’ve chosen to use it repeatedly.

First, and primary to my choice of Runestone for introductory classes, is the fact that using Runestone to learn computer programming material does not involve any installation or dealing with the varieties of operating systems and software, but it does require learning new vocabulary and practices for saving and running code.

I find that installation is a huge barrier for many introductory programming students. It can be difficult, time-consuming, and annoying. The difficulty or annoyance of installation of a programming language interpreter, a text editor, a command prompt software, or anything else, can feel like proof that a student new to these ideas “doesn’t belong here [in this class]”.

Students who have never done any computer programming before, especially students who do not have a lot of experience with software tools or other types of computing, often struggle (as many computer-types do for a long time into our careers, really!) with the difference between a problem that requires struggle and creative problem-solving, and a problem that is not truly creative or “computationally challenging” and is rather caused by an error you can’t control, or by forgetting to click a single button at the start of the installation process. And for large courses without a large staff of a TAs/et cetera, helping students complete installations with a ton of different systems and versions thereof can also be a huge pain, and not a great note on which to start a class – plus it’s difficult to balance this fact with the desire to start writing code and seeing things happen on your screen rigt away. Using a Runestone textbook solves these problems, and allows students to focus both on concepts AND upon the joy of seeing code “work” and even pass tests – on the in the very first week of class.

Secondly, everything is in one place, rather than having a plethora of blog posts, links, a textbook, code files… all from Day 1. While I do integrate non-Runestone resources into many such courses, the Runestone textbook is always “home” for students, who often express (in my experience) that they feel overwhelmed by having a lot of new material in programming as well as a lot of new resources to use.

Using a Runestone textbook also allows me to integrate graded work of various types with un-graded work, helping me to emphasize during class that learning to program usually requires a lot of practice. If such and such thing is required/graded, but there’s also A, B, and C helpful conceptual activities we will discuss in lecture next week… isn’t it useful that they’re just right there, too? A simplification, of course, but something I’ve valued especially when students in class don’t have a lot of experience learning a programming language and are still adapting their own learning and practice expectations for the course. What they need at first is all there on one website.

(In some courses I’ve moved “off” Runestone in a second half of the course, e.g. to using files and command prompts, but the Runestone experience they have is something they can continue to rely on and can use for practice, and remains a way of gaining new information about syntax and concepts since it is still our course textbook.)

What’s in Runestone?

With these ideas in mind, there are a few Runestone features that I’ve relied on heavily during introductory classes like those I describe.

One is, of course, the ActiveCode feature – we can write a program on the first day of class, and begin to understand the process of writing, thinking about, and running code, and how to see and check the results of code that’s been run. The CodeLens tool is a huge help with this, because explanations that I previously needed to include in additional resources or slides are built right into readings, so class time can focus on in-depth exploration that supports understanding even more.

Another is the ShowEval Trace and ShowEval Replace modes – as we begin writing code, I like to ensure I have a focus on understanding complex expressions and debugging, and this feature is a nice interactive way to focus specifically on evaluation of complex expressions without generating them correctly prior to evaluating them.

The availability of the Parsons Problems for a variety of reasons has proven valuable in my introductory courses – one way I like to use these features in class is that after I’ve, for example, assigned these as part of readings before class, I can return to them during a lecture so we can analyze together what ways of solving them are productive (rather than simple trial-and-error, for example), and we can really dig into useful ways of practicing and learning programming so students can experience them with me. I’ve used Parsons Problems both with code, like in the code based example at the bottom of this page, and with non-code words, like in the non-code example at the bottom of this page, and find a mix of the two helpful.

And finally, because I can assign reading assignments as part of the course, and I can choose a book with a structure I want (e.g. the way FOPP has chapters followed by exercises and sets of “chapter assessment” exercises) I can take advantage of the above to include all of those features (and others) in assignments/course work/student lab time/office hours. Students know that they will need to interact with these interactive features during the out of class time they spend reading, and we come back to the online course “home” to review and explore new concepts during class time.

When it comes time to introduce native programming on one’s own computer in the introductory courses that I teach, there’s a place to return to for conceptual things (the online Runestone textbook!), so it allows me in-class time to focus on identifying, and then solving, those problems that do come from ‘simply’ forgetting to click one button or remembering the type of your operating system – since identifying that kind of struggle/problem is also a very useful skill to identify and develop while students begin learning programming.

—

Wow, that sounds Awesome, how do I get started?

Well, you will still need a little familiarity with the command line. You will need to be able to run some docker and git commands.

For potential developers and contributors to the project, or for instructors who may need to run their own server due to university privacy policies or whatever the process of getting Runestone Server up and running is pretty straight forward. You can see the details here But lets walk through a conceptual overview of the process here.

1. Install Docker Yes, its a pretty big thing you have to install, but its been done millions of times and it really just works.

2. Clone the Runestone Server project from github (git clone https://github.com/RunestoneInteractive/RunestoneServer.git)

3. Choose one or more books you want to use in your course, or use in development, and clone them into the books folder of Runestone.

4. If you want to pre-populate users and or instructors you can make a csv file called instructors.csv and another called students.csv

5. Build the docker container

6. Run the docker container

The above steps will build the books you want to use in the course, populate a database with all the necessary tables and data to run Runestone as well as any instructors or students you want set up, and then start the RunestoneServer.

Again, detailed instructions are linked above, but it really is a lot easier than it was before. In addition, If you are a developer, you can simply make changes to the code right where you have cloned it and the Docker container will pick up those changes on your next request.

I think this could be a real breakthrough for getting more developers up and running quickly, and reduce support time for people who want to run their own server at their school. In any case I encourage you to give it a try, and please, please do report any problems you run into with getting a server up and running.

Runestone and Open Source

Much of Runestone is built with the help of other open source projects. I like to think of it as the “family tree” of the project. The root system goes very deep as every one of the projects that I mention is built on top of many other other open source projects. We are truly standing on the shoulders of thousands of giants who make make this open source eco system work.

Here is a list of our first level ancestors. I’m sure I’m leaving something or someone out and I apologize if that is you. Please let me know and I’ll update the post.

• Skulpt - Javascript Implementation of Python

• Sphinx A tool for making beautiful documentation that is highly extensible.

• Python Tutor Awesome tool for visualizing code

• web2py Our web development framework

• Docker

• Python

• ShowEval

• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist - The original text before we made our interactive edition.

• The number of Python packages approximately 75 are too many to mention individually.

• All of the books published on Runestone are open source projects.

Make Textbooks Free

I could follow a model of charging every student a modest sum of money to access books on Runestone Academy But did you know that about half of the schools that use Runestone are public high schools? That model does not work for public school students, and I don’t want to leave them behind. Runestone has saved students millions of dollars in textbook costs, and I’d like to keep it that way.

I could create a freemium business model, where the basic books are free, but more advanced features and teaching materials would cost the school money. That may still be a path to follow, but that makes the code more complex to check whether I should expose a feature to someone based on some flag that tells me if you’ve paid or not.

So instead, I’m doubling down on the supporter model by starting a Patreon campaign. Patreon is for people like us, for content creators that need support to keep on creating! You can use a trusted website to make a regular monthly payment that will come to Runestone.

We have so much work that we could do to make Runestone better than it is today. In my ideal world I would like to be able to hire students that have been through one or more Runestone courses. How cool is that? You got your introduction to CS through Runestone and now you can help develop the very platform that helped you get a start. At the same time they would get valuable resume building experience!

So, today I’m asking you to please support Runestone. Become a patron. It doesn’t have to be a lifetime commitment, but if Runestone has helped you this year why not help us in return?? Go to our page on Patreon and become a patron today.

Then, make sure you tell in the comments what you would like to see most in the next generation of Runestone tools and books.

Thanks!

Wandering Students

One problem with grading on Runestone is that I have noticed that students don’t always end up doing their work in the right class. Sometimes students don’t remember where they should be and end up Googling their way into Runestone. But often times this googling lands them in the “open to anyone” version of the textbook the instructor has chosen for the course. This means their activities are recorded under that course and not your own.

To combat this behavior I have added two features that require you to rebuild your course to activate.

• The Navbar for your course should now contain your course name, and not the name of the textbook. Teach them to pay attention to that. We are going to develop more visual cues to clearly differentiate between the open version of a course and a bespoke course this summer.

• When students are logged we now check to make sure that if they are in a course for which they have not registered we will alert them, and then take them to the course selector to make sure they are in the proper course.

We love to hear from yo, so let us know what you think of these updates!

Getting Started

The major steps in getting started are

• Installing Python

• Installing the Runestone Components

• Building your first lab

$ pip install runestone

$ mkdir mynewproject
$ cd mynewproject
$ runestone init

This will create a new Runestone project in your current directory.
Do you want to proceed?  [Y/n]: y
Next we need to gather a few pieces of information to create your configuration files
Project name: (one word, no spaces): MyLab
Path to build dir  [./build]:
Path to deploy built site  [../../static]:
Use Runestone Web Services  (true, false) [false]:
Your Name  [bradleymiller]:
Title for this project  [Runestone Default]: My First Lab
Use Simple Python3 Semantics  [false]: true
Default ActiveCode language [python]:
Enable inline Activecode downloads by default (single activecode downloads may be enabled with the :enabledownload: flag) [false]:
Done. Type runestone build to build your project

mynewproject/
        _static/
        _sources
        _templates
        build
        conf.py
        pavement.py

=====================
This Is A New Project
=====================


SECTION 1: Introduction
:::::::::::::::::::::::

Congratulations!   If you can see this file you have probably successfully run the ``runestone init`` command.  If you are looking at this as a source file you should now run ``runestone build``  to generate html files.   Once you have run the build command you can run ``runestone serve`` and then view this in your browser at ``http://localhost:8000``

This is just a sample of what you can do.  The index.rst file is the table of contents for your entire project.  You can put all of your writing in the index, or as you will see in the following section you can include additional rst files.  those files may even be in subdirectories that you can reference using a relative path.

The overview section, which follows is an ideal section to look at both online and at the source.  It is pretty easy to see how to write using any of the interactive features just by looking at the examples in ``overview.rst``


SECTION 2: An Overview of the extensions
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 2

   overview.rst


SECTION 2: Add more stuff here
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

You can add more stuff here.

=============
My Sample Lab
=============

Part 1: Turtle Graphics
=======================

In this section we will do the following:

* Create a turtle
* Make the turtle draw a box

.. activecode:: turtle1

   import turtle

   timmy = turtle.Turtle()
   for i in range(4):
       timmy.forward(100)
       timmy.right(90)


Now it is your turn.  Can you modify the program to make timmy draw an octagon instead of a square?

$ runestone doc --list
Runestone Directives List
    activecode
    clickablearea
    codelens
    datafile
    disqus
    dragndrop
    fillintheblank
    mchoice
    parsonsprob
    poll
    qnum
    reveal
    shortanswer
    showeval
    tab
    tabbed
    timed
    usageassignment
    video
    vimeo
    youtube

runestone doc fillintheblank

    .. fillintheblank:: some_unique_id_here

        Complete the sentence: |blank| had a |blank| lamb. One plus one is: (note that if there aren't enough blanks for the feedback given, they're added to the end of the problem. So, we don't **need** to specify a blank here.)

        -   :Mary: Is the correct answer.
            :Sue: Is wrong.
            :x: Try again. (Note: the last item of feedback matches anything, regardless of the string it's given.)
        -   :little: That's right.
            :.*: Nope.
        -   :2: Right on! Numbers can be given in decimal, hex (0x10 == 16), octal (0o10 == 8), binary (0b10 == 2), or using scientific notation (1e1 == 10), both here and by the user when answering the question.
            :2 1: Close.... (The second number is a tolerance, so this matches 1 or 3.)
            :x: Nope. (As earlier, this matches anything.)

    config values (conf.py):

    - fitb_div_class - custom CSS class of the component's outermost div

Giving Students Browser Access to the Lab

At this point the build folder has a static webpage that you can upload to any web server. If you have your own webpage hosted on a school server that you normally use for class you can make your Lab available to the students by simply taking the folder mynewproject inside the build folder and putting that on your website. The folder is self contained and can be hosted on any web server.

If you know the IP Address of your own computer and you simply want to give let students bring up the webpage from your computer you can do that too. For example, lets suppose you know that your IP address is 10.0.0.23 Your students can get everything they need from http://10.0.0.23:8000/index.html

In another post, I’ll cover how to host your lab using Github pages.

If you have questions or comments on getting going, please leave them below, or join our community on Slack or our Google Group. You’ll find links to these resources on our Support Page

A Roadmap for the Future

The sign of a good project is that the todo list never gets shorter. Every time I cross something off the list three new things replace it. There is no doubt that with focus, time and energy that Runestone can be way more awesome than it is today. The details and current development priorities are outlined here .

What I am most interested in is creating a sustainable community around Runestone so that it will continue after I am not caring for it every day. This means a concerted effort on funding, on growing the number of students, and building the number of authors and developers.

All of the above has been happening organically, but we need to accelerate on all fronts. This new home page, is one part of that. YOu will begin to see articles detailing development, as well as posts about how people are using Runestone in the classroom in real life. Please share this site with your friends, and colleagues, introduce influencers to Runestone and help us spread the word.