Research Project Calculator to be shut down June 2017

After careful review, deliberation, and conversation, Minitex has decided to discontinue the Research Project Calculator (RPC) at rpc.elm4you.org. We will support the RPC through the entirety of the 2016-2017 school year, and will shut it down on June 16, 2017.

The RPC was developed in 2006 using the University of Minnesota’s open source Assignment Calculator. It built upon that tool to focus on the student research process, using customizations that were led by the inspirational work of Leslie Yoder (of St Paul Public Schools) and Jane Prestebak (of Robbinsdale Schools). Through the years, the RPC has been updated to add functionalities including customizable templates, integration of library databases, teacher resources, assignment sharing options, and more. Technical design and leadership were provided by Michael Berkowski, Link Swanson, and Paul Swanson of Minitex.   

In the last year the RPC came due for updates. We did extensive research (in the form of user surveys, analytics analysis, and focus groups) into how people use the RPC, how much they use it, what users like and dislike about the RPC, and more. After review of those findings we came to the conclusion to no longer support the RPC.

We will reach out to those who have created accounts in order to communicate this change, and will share the news broadly as well.

Thank you to all the librarians and educators who have used the RPC over the years to help students through the research process. Thanks to the students who used the RPC to complete their projects on time. And thanks to the institutions who have taken the open source code and made the RPC their own. That code will continue to be available for institutions that would like to host their own version of the RPC, and we look forward to seeing how the RPC continues to evolve and grow!