PreTeXt, Runestone, and the exciting future of open textbooks

In late June, I was fortunate to attend a week-long UTMOST workshop in Ann Arbor that brought together education researchers, PreTeXt developers, Runestone developers, and textbook authors.

The newest part to me was learning more about Runestone. Runestone Academy was founded by Brad Miller in 2011; Brad is an emeritus professor of computer science at Luther College, and his original goal was to have textbooks with interactive code that the reader could experiment with. More than a decade later, he has an amazing platform that is part textbook-hosting service, part open-source textbooks, part tools for writing texts, and part “small LMS”, plus an open-source server to support the texts on the platform.

Brad wrote a great post about the workshop in Ann Arbor and the partnership that he and Rob Beezer have forged between Runestone and PreTeXt: “Going forward PreTeXt will be the primary authoring language for books hosted on Runestone Academy.” In the other direction, I expect that in the near future we will see that Runestone becomes the primary platform on which PreTeXt books are served. Let me say more about what I mean by that.

One of the greatest strengths of PreTeXt is that it allows a book to be interactive. There are currently possibilities for free-response reading questions, interactive Sage cells, and WeBWorK exercises. At present (without Runestone), only the reading responses can be easily tracked in a PreTeXt book where the instructor can see what students did (and even that requires some special dispensation from the PreTeXt developers). Essentially what has been needed is an easy way for students to log in to the book they are using, and then have the results of their work recorded and easily accessed by the instructor. Runestone provides this capability (and more). You might think of it as the textbook living inside of the LMS, with exercises in the text being tracked by Runestone in the way that a WeBWorK server tracks student work on WeBWorK exercises.

This change will also allow authors to move away from WeBWorK. There are new developments regarding WeBWorK-like exercises that can be written in native PreTeXt. These will eventually eliminate the need to be connected to a WeBWorK server, and the work students do on them can be tracked, provided the course is being run through Runestone.

For me personally, I have long thought that the exercises in Active Calculus need to be strengthened, and I can see a path where the combination of native PreTeXt exercises served via Runestone will be a great motivator to get to work on that (big) project. Runestone has a feature that promotes in-class peer instruction that will also merit some serious thinking for how that might be incorporated into AC.

Beyond the exciting developments regarding the partnership between PreTeXt and Runestone, we also heard reports from Vilma Mesa and her team at the University of Michigan about their wide-ranging research into how students and instructors use textbooks. A meta lesson that I took from that is: textbooks can help shape instruction for the better.

Beyond working on the APC, ACS, and ACM books themselves, I will be working over the next year or so to improve the “ecosystem” that surrounds the text by making ancillary materials better organized and easier for new users to access in the hope that these materials will help even more instructors transition to using one or more of the texts.

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