Summer Developments
The Runestone developers have been busy this summer. Here are some of the highlights:
Beta of new Assignment Builder
We have been working on a new version of the Assignment Builder that will allow you to create questions without knowing RST or PreTeXt. Its completely rebuilt from the ground up and is much more user friendly, using modern web technologies like React and Redux. We are looking for people to try it out. The current assignment builder will remain available, and contains a link for you to try the new version.
Real Time Score Updates
We now detect when a student has submitted an answer to a question that is part of an assignment. When they submit the answer, we will update the score in the grade book in real time. This is a feature that has been requested by many of our instructors and students. Students will see their current score on the assignment page as well as the assignment selection page. You will also notice that most questions now have an extra little icon to indicate that the question is correct or incorrect. This makes the questions consistent. We plan to also add an icon to indicate that the question is part of an assignment, but thats not ready yet.
Peer Instruction Improvements
Peer instruction now has a great new instructor page for you to view a summary of what happened during peer instruction. You can see how many students answered each question, and how many students got the question correct. You can also see how many students answered each question correctly on the first try. This is a great way to see how well your students are understanding the material. We have also added an option to allow the students to record who they talked with if you don’t want to use the chat feature on the web page but would prefer your students talk to each other face to face.
Chapter Activity Report Addition
Another feature that many people have asked for is a simple summary to show how many of the activities on each page a student got correct. This is now available in the drop down menu of Chapter Activity Report called “Number of activities Correct”
Book Discussion Forums
On the home page for your course, you may see a link to a discussion forum for the book the course is using. These links are only available if you are an instructor, and we encourage you to use them to ask questions, and share ideas and materials with other instructors using the same book. In the coming years we hope to build a community of instructors around each book, and provide more structured ways to share materials, such as quizzes, exams, assignments, slides, and other materials. We know we don’t always provide everything you need, and we hope that by building a community of instructors around each book we can help you find the materials you need. These forums will only work if you participate, so please join in and help us build a community around the books you are using.
Using LTI?
If you are using LTI you will notice a big change that we hope you appreciate. Instead of showing the assignment list to students, they will see a message reminding them that they need to launch the assignment from your LMS. In the past this has been the source of much confusion for students, and we hope this change will make it more clear to them that they need to launch the assignment from your LMS.
Textbook Improvements
Many textbooks have had lots of improvements as well. More of the books have been converted to PreTeXt and have a more modern look and feel, and we keep adding new textbooks all the time. We have added many math books at various levels, We encourage you to tell your Mathematics friends to check us out. We encourage you to tell all your friends to check us out.
Bug Fixes
There have also been many bug fixes and improvements to the system. We are always working to make the system better and more reliable.
More to Come
We have many more features in the works, such as overhauling the grading page, and providing better summary reports about assignments. We are always looking for feedback from our users. If you have a feature you would like to see, or a bug you would like fixed, please let us know. We are always looking for ways to make the system better. Join us in our Discord channel. We would love to hear from you.