Section 1.3 Privacy
In order to do things like remember work in progress, record scores, etc. Runestone needs a student to have a persistent user id. In 2022 we realize it is quite common to use one’s email address as that persistent identifier, but we do not. We still use usernames so that you or your student can make up something completely disconnected from a students personal information. In fact one can successfully use runestone with a random username, a fake email address, and a fake first and last name. The only caveat to that is that if you forget your password you won’t be able to reset it with a fake email address! See Subsection 4.2.1 for more information.
We urge you to read our
Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service We understand that in 2022 it is common, especially for high schools, to want us to sign a data privacy agreement. Please understand that as an open source project we do not have a lot of resources for reading legalese. Thankfully many states have now adopted the National Data Privacy Agreement (NDPA) We have studied and are very happy to sign the NDPA. In fact for many states we only have to sign the agreement once and all you have to do is sign and send us Exhibit E. This blog post explains more about Why we are happy to sign the NDPA
One of the strengths of Runestone is that many of our features have been created and tested and validated by published research! That is good news for your students. It also means that we do cooperate with a small number of highly trusted research partners at major universities. We give them access to fully de-identified data from our database to help them conduct experiements on new features. This makes the experience better for everyone while keeping your student’s work anonymous.
