Using eBooks with Runestone Academy: The PreTeXt Interactive Edition

There is a help and documentation area built into the Instructors Page on Runestone Academy. That may be where you found this Instructors Guide. This is a good place to start. If you can’t find the answer to your question here or in one of the videos then that is a bug that needs to be fixed.

The implementation of Runestone is “opinionated” that is, it is informed by my own expereiences and preferences as a teacher, as well as the experiences and preferences of some core contributors. It is difficult for a system like this to be all things to all people without imploding on itself under the weight of a thousand different configuration options that make many things possible, but almost nothing good, and nobody happy. It may not work the way you think it should but over the years it has proven do be able to do most of what people really want. So maybe give it a chance.

There are two opportunities each week to ask questions of the development team. Tuesday afternoons from 1PM Central to 3PM Central on Zoom. The link is always the same and is always provided as a reminder in the slack channel. The Zoom meeting number is RUNESTONE1 on your telephone keypad.  The link is:  RUNESTONE1

Since May  2020 there has been a standing weekly online gathering of PreTeXt and Runestone authors and developers. It runs on Friday afternoons for three hours and is announced Friday mornings on the pretext-announce Google Group. Sometimes there are scheduled discussions on development topics or seminars on topics of interest to authors and developers; but mostly there is no agenda and no schedule. Come late, leave early, drop-in, drop-out. If you are present, then you are implicitly available to help someone with questions, even if you are working on something yourself. The rest of us may lurk and/or join in. We can use break-out rooms if a subgroup wants to run a discussion, work on a targeted project, or help somebody get started one-on-one. The model is the hotel lobby after dinner at a workshop, but you provide your own contraband.

So this is a great place to discuss a support question (likely with the person who wrote the code!) or a place to get involved with development.

We welcome feature requests and of course problem reports. The best way to make Runestone Academy better is to listen to the people who are using it every day.

Please note, I’m not trying to be rude, but years of observation have taught me that CS teachers are pretty bad bug reporters! Imagine if a student sent you the following email:

Hey,

You know problem 2 for the homework next week.  
My program just doesn't work.  I'm pretty sure 
I've done everything right.  Can you tell me how 
to fix it?

Thanks,

Student

You wouldn’t be able to help this student very much, in fact you probably wouldn’t have any idea what program that student was even asking about without spending your own valuable time figuring it out. Sadly, It is a pretty good representation of thousands of bug reports I’ve received. So please, take a few seconds and read or re-read Filing an effective bug report. Thanks.

As a project that is licensed openly, we welcome contributions. And this does not necessarily mean you need to learn Javascript or Python or XSL. For ideas, find the issues on GitHub that have the label good first issue and/or help wanted. Upating this guide, recording screen casts to replace the 11 year old screen casts in some of our books are examples of non-coding tasks that would be amazing.