Using eBooks with Runestone Academy: The PreTeXt Interactive Edition

First lets clear up a couple of misconcptions. There is no way for me to know, just by your email address that you are an instructor. You could be anyone. So, there is no such thing as an instructor account. Accounts can have various roles including: student, instructor, author, editor, and administrator.

You get the instructor role by creating a course. This gives you the privileges associated with being an instructor but ONLY for that course and any other course(s) you create. You are not an instructor for any of the open courses or anyone else’s course. There is a really nice video to help you get started in the Instructors Guide

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https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/instructorguide/frontmatter-1.html?mode=browsing

Please check it out as it will answer many other questions and help you make the most of Runestone.

I have made a very informal set of videos

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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAfQvSLv5senKZHfaycIz8w

for just this purpose.

We also have a nice new Instructor Guide

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https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/instructorguide/frontmatter-1.html?mode=browsing

In 99.99% of the cases, this is because you are confusing your email address with the username you were forced to enter when you register. So, go through the password reset process and get yourself logged in again. Then look in the upper right hand corner of the page and pull down the user menu (the one that looks like a person.) Your username will be displayed at the top of that menu. We use username instead of email address to protect the privacy of our users.

Technically, I can. But I won’t. Runestone handles over 100 password resets a day automatically. It can handle yours as well. There are two things you should check.

Sorry, but we do not have control over Coursera and especially the courses from UMSI. Those courses are designed for you to access through Canvas. If that is not working please contact your coursera instructor.

See this post for a detailed description: Privacy and Runestone

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https://blog.runestone.academy/2019/10/25/privaterunestone.html

You invite them, either in class or with an email. Tell them to register at runestone.academy and then give them the name of the course you created. During the registration process they type in the name you used, and they are registered. I usually just do this the first day of class to make sure everyone gets registered and then give them a little tour of the book and all of the things they can do.

In the future, we may look into importing a class from some LMS system like Moodle and others.

A green checkmark for a page means that you have completed that page, either you have satisfied yourself that you are done OR you have attempted all of the interactive activities on that page. It does NOT mean you got everything correct. Clicking the button bottom of the page WILL NOT give you full credit on a reading assignment, you still need to do the work.

Historically this was ONLY for your own personal benefit to help you keep track of the things you had read and the things you were currently reading. It has evolved and with that evolution comes some confusion. Hopefully this clears it up.

Some exercises pages have over 300 problems. Do you really think we expect you to do ALL of them? We expect your instructor to use some discretion when assigning you homework. You will not find green checkmarks for Exercises or for table of contents pages.

Sorry if that freaks you out, but that is just how we do it.

In my years of teaching computer science I was always learning something new and trying to stay ahead of the students. I understand that for many of you this might be a first time teaching a CS course, and that for many you are overworked and underpaid. I hear you, and I feel your pain.

But just as I tell my students, you can’t really learn this stuff just by reading the answer, you have to do it.

We have many books on Runestone Academy written by many authors. Whether or not authors provide an instructor guide or answers to all the questions is up to them. So there is no blanket answer to the question.

For myself there are several reasons:

Yes, we are currently hosting many courses for many different institutions around the world. In fact in 2013 one large institution had 800 students using one of the books.

The best approach is to use our system to build your own textbook. This gives you several advantages as an instructor including:

Yes. We host this on a very reliable service and we monitor our traffic constantly. We use a content distribution network for increased scalability and reliability. In the Fall of 2020 we serve over 50,000 students a day with no downtime. Runestone is also used for a couple of courses on coursera which have hundreds of thousands of students, and by many large Universities.

The old domain name, “interactivepython.org” was becoming quite inacurate. Although we started with Python we have a lot of users that are using the AP CS Review book (Java) and my Java for Python programmers book. There is also at least one statistics textbook written in runestone as well. I saw the domain name “runestone.academy” and thought that would be cool.

You should create a new course and then from the instructor page in the new course copy the assignments from your old course. The assignment dates will be adjusted based on the class start date.

The instructor interface allows you to copy all your assignments from a past course into your current course, so re-using an old assignment is pretty simple. It even re-calculates a due date for your based on the delta between your old term start date and when you had the assignment due that term.

Nothing. Bug fixes are automatically deployed weekly.

Once you are done experimenting please delete your course from the instructors interface. If this does not happen I may have to invent a way to go back and remove courses that were clearly created as an experiment but never really used by students.

That would be awesome. This whole book is open source. You can grab a copy of the source on github

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https://github.com/RunestoneInteractive

. The source for thinkcspy and pythonds is in the source folder and there is a subfolder for each chapter. If you want to make a whole new chapter then create a folder and follow the conventions of one of the other chapters. There is full documentation for the markup language at PreTeXt Guide

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PreTeXt Guide

. When you are finished make a pull request and we’ll review your material and incorporate them into the book.

You can add your own custom exercises by editing the assignments.rst file. This file is meant for the descriptive or question text for a programming exercise. Adding an exercise to this file does not automatically add it to the grading interface for your course, you still need to do that from the instructors interface. See this blog post

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http://reputablejournal.com/Organizing-your-Runestone-Course.html

for more information.

New exercises are always welcome and we would love to expand the number of exercises. The simplest way is to go to the github issues

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http://github.com/bnmnetp/RunestoneInteractive/rs/issues

page and file a new issue. In the description simply include the text for the exercise and which chapter you think it should go in. We’ll take it from there. After we’ve added the exercise you can rebuild your book and it will be there.

There are many answers to this, as the question itself is very vague. Where is it not showing up? What is not showing up? The first thing to say is that Runestone goes to great lengths to save everything! It is extremely rare for an action to go unrecorded. With that said here are things to check.

Under the 👤 menu you will find the Change Course option. click on that and then at the bottom of the page click on the Enroll in a Course button. From there you can just enter the new course in the Course Name field.

If you are enrolled in a course at a high school, college or university your instructor should give you the name. If they didn’t you need to ask them. If you are learning on your own, The registration page gives you the full list as does our library page. But here are the legal, open, courses that anyone can sign up for. Since you are here you didn’t see that so here is the list:

Ok, this is a question that has the potential to start nasty religious wars. The technical answer is that this book uses a version of Python called Skulpt

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http://skulpt.org

. It is entirely written in Javascript so that it runs right in the browser. We think this is very cool. Now some people get all crazy about whether they should teach Python 3 or Python 2. The truth is that for CS1 and CS2 it really does not matter. Skulpt can do print with or without parenthesis, and / can do true division or integer division and lets face it for CS1 that is really all that matters. Sure, there are differences, but are you really going to start out by teaching your students about dict_keys and how they are different from a list. If so, I think you are cruel and you should teach your students APL. If you want to slant your teaching toward Python 3, you can do that with this book. If you want to lean towards 2, you can do that too. When you build your course there is a configuration parameter that lets you choose Python3, this forces you to use parenthesis when you print, and it makes python / default to true division, and // to integer division.

Please let us know! You can file bug reports on our github issues page

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http://github.com/RunestoneInteractive/rs/issues

. Thanks! If you don’t have a github account then join us on our Discord channel.

This might require a little extra learning on your part but here is what you need to do. If you can’t get this to work on your own ask your teacher for some help.

6. Run the command runestone serve and then in your browser go to http://localhost:8000

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http://localhost:8000

This will let you access your book from a webserver running on your own computer, It will save your work locally, as long as you use the same browser.  But it will NOT share or sync any information with Runestone.academy

Because what we are focused on is building great interactive textbooks, pdfs are not interactive. Update!! Our partnership with the PreTeXt team allows us to build books in many formats including PDF. If your book has been converted there is a good chance we can get you a PDF.

Very well thank you! Every student interaction is logged to the runestone database using UTC time. When you create an assignment with a deadline store the time in the timezone of the instructor making the assignment as the deadline. Given that we can fairly judge whether a student has completed their work on time. Trust me we have figured this out over the years and learned a lot about time zones. Did you know there are places in the world where there are half or quarter hour differences between two timezones??!!

I realize that students will often complain that they had their work done on time but the darn Runestone would not give them credit. Usually they are wrong. But you have several ways of checking out their claim including downloading the log for your course or looking at the Student Activity report and checking their first and last interactions with the problem. The software has proven itself to be correct way more often than the students and we use one of the most reliable databases in the world (Postgresql) to keep track of student activities!