The mission of Runestone Academy is to democratize textbooks for the 21st century. To accomplish that mission we make high quality interactive textbooks available for free to all students. In the 21st century it is silly to think of textbooks statically, so we make great interactive textbooks that engage students in their learning. It would also be silly to ignore the rich data that an online textbook can provide to students, teachers, authors and researchers. To support these different stakeholders we have created a Learning Engineering and Analytics Portal (LEAP). That is quite a lot to digest so let us unpack that to see what it means in practical terms.
Learning Engineering is the systematic application of evidence-based principles and methods from educational technology and the learning sciences to create engaging and effective learning experiences, support the difficulties and challenges of learners as they learn, and come to better understand learners and learning. Everything we do on Runestone Academy takes this engineering approach to continuous improvement.
Analytics As an instructor understaning your students, which of them are struggling, which of them are working hard, which of them are successful or not is key. Runestone lets you quickly look at a dashboard of student progress to help you decide how to spend your classroom time most effectively. As a researcher or author you want to know what parts of your book are read the most, which questions are effective and which are duds that should be replaced or fixed to make them better.
Portal: Runestone Academy is a portal for online textbooks, students can interact with our books on any device for free. Runestone Academy is a portal for teachers who want to create a course, grade their students work, and monitor their progress all in one place. Runestone Acaademy is a portal for authors and researchers who want to invent new pedagogical strategies and try them out on lots of students while gaining access to anonymous information to help them better understand how students learn.
We have partnered with the PreTeXt project to provide an outstanding authoring tool to create interactive textbooks. And not only interactive textbooks in HTML but highly accessible textbooks in many formats including ePub, PDF, and braille.
Runestone Academy LTD operates as a non-profit 501(c)(3) as approved by the IRS.