Runestone: A platform for free, on-line, and interactive ebooks

Abstract

The Runestone platform is open-source, extensible, and serves free ebooks to over 25,000 learners a day from around the world. The site hosts 18 ebooks for computing courses. Some of these ebook have been translated into several languages. There are ebooks for secondary computer science (AP CSP and AP CSA), CS1, CS2, data science, and web programming courses. The platform currently supports executable and editable examples in Python, Java, C, C++, HTML, JavaScript, Processing, and SQL. Runestone provides features for instructors, learners, authors, and researchers. Instructors can create a custom course from any of the existing ebooks and their students can register for that course. Instructors can create assignments from the existing material or author new problems, grade assignments, and visualize student progress. Learners can execute and modify examples and answer practice questions with immediate feedback. Runestone includes common practice types, such as multiple-choice questions, as well as some unique types, such as adaptive Parsons problems. Authors can modify the existing ebooks or write new ebooks using restructuredText: a markup language. Researchers can create and test new interactive features, run experiments, and analyze log file data. This paper describes the architecture of the platform, highlights some of the unique features, provides an overview of how instructors use the platform, summarizes the research studies conducted on the platform, and describes plans for future development.