A Practical Introduction to Databases
I am pleased to announce the availability of the new textbook A Practical Introduction to Databases on Runestone Academy (book id: practical_db). The purpose of this book is to provide a free, open textbook on material of practical interest for students going into computing professions. The text at present is suitable as the core of an introductory course on databases, and may also find use as a gentle introduction to the topic in more advanced courses on databases, web applications, or software engineering.
In this first release, the book covers three core topics: SQL, data modeling, and relational database theory.
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
WeBWorK Hosting Fees
In case you missed it, check out the annual WeBWorK report from last December.
Starting Fall 2022, we are raising the fee for WeBWorK hosting for most (but not all) institutions. The goal is to bring a little more support to WeBWorK and Runestone developers who still do the majority of code development as volunteer workers. All of the additional revenue will go to those nonprofit organizations (once the additional taxes are accounted for). For example, I’m not going to paid more starting in the Fall. In fact, we’ve streamlined some things and will be reducing the per course alottment that I am paid.
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
PreTeXt Runestone Workshop
Happy July 4th Weekend! I am glad to be home after almost two weeks in Ann Arbor Michigan. But it was a great two weeks. Here are a few of the highlights.
The week of June 20 – 24 was the first joint workshop with the PreTeXt team. We had 28 attendees including authors, developers, educational researchers, and instructors representing the Runestone and PreTeXt projects. One of the main goals for the week was to give everyone a chance to get to know each other and learn more about the two projects.
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!
Summer 2022
Summer time is often when instructors of all kinds can help out with Runestone Development. Since June marks the beginning of summer I thought I would highlight what is on my list for development list for the next few months. If something sounds interesting to you then please get in touch!
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.
Peer+ Webinar
Today, Barb Ericson and I hosted a webinar on Peer+. Peer+ is an NSF funded research project on using Peer Instruction in a Runestone eBook. Click the link to see a recording of the 1 hour zoom or feel free to just look at the slides
I won’t try to repeat the information here, but just emphasize that Peer Instruction is a well studied way to increase your students engagement and success in your class. Please check it out, and don’t hesitate to give us feedback on this exciting new feature.
The New New Academy
This is a big announcement that changes some things very little and some things a lot!
We have incorporated Runestone Academy and applied for 501(c)(3) status. Creating the new corporation is done and official. Eventually, Runestone Interactive LLC will cease to exist as a corporate entity. As of January 1, 2022 the server that you have come to know as runestone.academy is operating under Runestone Academy LTD.
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.
Academy Update
Thanks to everyone for your patience over the last three weeks! As a recap here is what has transpired.
I took Runestone Academy offline on Christmas day and started up my script to migrate the database to a new machine dedicated to running Postgresql. That script took just over 25 hours to complete. It modernizes the database and adds many new constraints to make sure that when we store something in the database it is good and consistent and valid.
On January 27 I brought up two “worker bee” servers and our load balancer. This allows me to add as many “worker bees” as we may need to serve the traffic going to runestone. I changed our DNS entry to point “runestone.academy” at the new load balancer. Unfortunately I did not delete a previous DNS entry so now some people were getting the old address and some the new. Chaos ensued for a few days.
By Monday January 3rd I was patting myself on the back and thinking “this is going better than I thought” LOL – Many problems – to numerous to count ensued as soon as classes actually started again.
LTI - or what I call the “community supported feature” was just supposed to work. But did not. Thankfully I think that as of yesterday it is now working great!
Today was the first day since December 27 that I have not had a new bug report. I know there are still problems out there, but at this point they are outliers not the norm. That does not mean I don’t care, I do, but it does mean that I need a lot of detailed information to try to figure out what is wrong. Major widespread problems are easy to figure out because I hear from hundreds of people. I’m not hearing from 100’s anymore!! So details are important.
If your students are having trouble
Logout - clear browsing history, and log in.
Try incogito mode
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!
Academy Downtime
Runestone Academy is undergoing some major upgrades this holiday season! Unfortunately these changes will result in some downtime. Here is our schedule of events so you know what to expect in the coming weeks.
December 25 - 26 Runestone will be offline as we move our database server to its own machine. In order to ensure that we don’t lose any data we need to take all of the books offline while we move the database. This is also a great time for us to do some maintainance on our data in preparation for our new servers.
December 26-27 Bring Runestone.academy back online. In this initial period the old servers will come back up but use the database in its own location. There may be some unexpected crashes during this period as we have added a number of protections to the database to keep future data problems.
December 27–January 1 Migrate away from the old server and onto the new servers. If all goes well this is mostly just some DNS changes, but it will still likely cause the appearance of some downtime as you may not reach the new server and / or the old server may look like its certificate is expired.
January 3 and onward Back to business as usual. Although there are likely to be some hiccups as traffic picks up with students and teachers getting back to school.
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
Annual WeBWorK report
As we near the end of the year, it feels like a good time to report on Runestone’s foray into WeBWorK hosting. In Fall 2020, Runestone began this service. Three factors contributed to this:
Runestone had just set up its own WeBWorK server to support PreTeXt books that use WeBWorK.
The MAA hosting service was coming to a close, and many users would soon have no hosting service to turn to.
The COVID pandemic was on the upswing, and institutions everywhere were looking for new (to them) online tools to support remote learning.
So it seemed like a useful idea for Runestone to offer a WeBWorK hosting service. For that first Fall 2020 semester, hosting was free while we assessed the cloud computing and customer service demands. Since January 2021, hosting incurs a $100 fee per course.
Facts and Figures
Over the terms and semesters of 2021, the service has supported:
62 institutions in 8 countries (55 higher ed and 7 secondary)
117 individual sections
Our revenue from this service was $10,800. For transparency, here is where this money has gone. These numbers are preliminary, as the year is not yet over. But I expect they won’t differ by a significant amount. - $5400 to Alex for work hours - $1493 operational expenses - $1076 Runestone paying taxes - $1365 transferred to The WeBWorK Project - $1365 retained by Runestone
The last two items are particularly important. These amounts may be small, but they contribute to a future of sustainable support for WeBWorK and Runestone. Each project is an open source software development, and relies on “tens of thousands of dollars” in annual development. That is in quotes because for the most part, the work is done by unpaid volunteers. That’s not a sustainable practice, and we lose good contributors to burnout. Real funding will help the developers feel appreciated, and in some cases buy out a chunk of their day job duties (say, one course release) and provide real time for their efforts.
Moving Forward
My goal is to grow each of those last two numbers up to $4000 for next year’s report. I think this can be accomplished considering:
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.
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.
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
On Data Privacy Agreements
An Open Letter
Rant Alert
Before I get into the heart of this I will apologize in advance if this sounds a little like a rant. I started this post on a day when I got three different reqeusts to sign contracts! I am trying to clarify my position, open a dialog, and provide you some alternatives for using Runestone without needing a long contract.
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:
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.
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.
As a free and open source project we don’t have any money to promise to reimburse you for anything if something goes wrong.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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