The STEMcoding Learning Management System (STEMcoding LMS) is a website (hosted at http://stemcoding.herokuapp.com) that is owned and operated by the non-profit STEMcoding Education Ohio. This non-profit was founded by Dr. Chris Orban and Dr. Richelle Teeling-Smith.
By using this website, you agree to the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy.
The STEMcoding LMS uses source code that was developed by software engineers at Ohio State University. The site https://stemcoding.herokuapp.com is actually a mirror site of https://stemcoding.osu.edu which was developed in 2017 to serve OSU students and staff. Through a licensing agreement in 2020 with Ohio State University the non-profit STEMcoding Education Ohio was permitted to use this same source code for the purposes of creating a mirror site (http://stemcoding.herokuapp.com)
The software used in the STEMcoding LMS is secure and the team at Ohio State that developed it follows established best practices to ensure that reasonable precautions are made to protect this data from unauthorized access.
The STEMcoding LMS is hosted on the popular heroku platform with database info stored on amazon web services. The only individual with access to this data is Dr. Chris Orban and Dr. Richelle Teeling-Smith.
To be clear, STEMcoding Education Ohio and the STEMcoding LMS is not a registered minors program of Ohio State University. STEMcoding Education Ohio is a registered non-profit organization in the state of Ohio that is separate from these universities except for the licensing agreement with Ohio State University for the source code.
Costs:
Teachers who use the site will be charged about $20 per year. The actual cost is about $1 more than $20 because of online payment charges. Student use of the site is free and teachers can enroll as many students as they like.
Teachers can register for the site and set up a class. If we see that students have joined the class we will send a paypal invoice to the teacher email for $20. This invoice will be from STEMcoding Education Ohio.
How student data will be protected:
We have not in the past, not currently, nor in the future do we plan to use the student data on http://stemcoding.herokuapp.com in an educational research study. If we were going to perform an educational research study it would need to be approved by Ohio State University (OSU) and they would require us to use stemcoding.osu.edu (which is hosted on OSU servers) instead of stemcoding.herokuapp.com to perform this study.
We have not in the past, not currently, nor in the future do we plan to sell or provide any of the student data (for example names and email addresses) to another party for any purpose. For example, students will NOT receive any kind of college recruitment emails as a result of their use of http://stemcoding.herokuapp.com At present the only use of these email addresses is if students forget their password and request an email to reset their password. There are also features planned to send students emails when their code submissions are reviewed by their teacher, or if an assignment due date is coming up. These are the only uses of the email addresses that the student provides.
Because we are running and maintaining the site ourselves (rather than pay someone to do this at substantial cost) we are able to keep our expenses low. Also, we are incorporated as a non-profit because we are not interested in a profit-maximizing model. The $20 per year per teacher model is enough for us to cover our expenses in running the site and the non-profit.
The STEMcoding Learning Management System (STEMcoding LMS) is a website hosted at https://stemcoding.herokuapp.com that uses source code that was developed by software engineers at Ohio State University. The site is owned and operated by the non-profit STEMcoding Education Ohio which was created by Dr. Chris Orban and Dr. Richelle Teeling-Smith. Through a licensing agreement with Ohio State University, the non-profit is permitted to use this source code to allow teachers and students outside of Ohio State University to access the STEMcoding LMS.
The STEMcoding LMS is used by going to the website using a browser and logging on. There is no software or browser plugin to download and install. To date, over 1500 students and over a dozen teachers have used the STEMcoding LMS on a number of different operating systems and browsers without incident.
The STEMcoding LMS is provided “as is” to instructors and students. By using the STEMcoding LMS you agree to hold harmless the non-profit STEMcoding Education Ohio for any software or hardware damage that may occur. The team that wrote the source code for the site have taken reasonable precautions for this in designing the site, but in using the site you are accepting the risk involved.
Site Security
You are prohibited from violating or attempting to violate the security of this site, or attempting to use the site to gain unauthorized access to any other computer system. Such violations may result in civil or criminal liability. We may involve, and cooperate with, law enforcement authorities in prosecuting anyone who is involved in such violations.
Third Party Websites
There may be content on our site that links to the sites and services of others. We do not control these sites and services, and are not responsible for them. Those sites’ terms of use and privacy policies will be applicable to your interaction with those sites and services.
Changes to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
We may update this privacy policy from time to time. When we do, we revise the “updated” date at the top of this page. We encourage you to review our Privacy Policy on a regular basis to note any changes made to this policy.
Technical support:
If you run into technical support issues of any kind, you can email stemcodingohio@gmail.com and it will automatically notify both Dr. Chris Orban and Dr. Richelle Teeling-Smith. The webmaster for the site is Dr. Chris Orban. He can be emailed directly at chris.m.orban@gmail.com