 So welcome everybody to the product update for the month of May 2020. So the things that we wanted to start with would be to show you a couple of things that we have released or have been working on lately that you may have missed or that are new to press books. And I want to start with some of the smaller features and then we'll talk a little bit more about the big projects that are ongoing. The first thing that I wanted to share was a bug or an issue that we had noticed that has been fixed and has now been deployed to all press books networks in the latest release. So previously when you made these various different colored text boxes you can insert them in your text. So you could have a learning objectives or key takeaways or exercises or an examples text box. If you were to just make a standard text box let's say I made a key takeaways text box what would happen by default is there would be some heading text in just a regular paragraph but you could if you wanted to change it to be heading like a heading two or heading three or heading four element. And previously those elements just accepted the color of the heading element rather than the text box header value. So what's changed is now if you go into theme options for a book you'll see in your web book you have the ability to change the header color. This is the text color for the header for each one of these different text boxes. And previously it would change the default value but if you had changed it to a heading this rule wasn't catching the headings and so they were just sometimes it would be like a blue heading on a blue background and it was nearly illegible and it was causing accessibility problems. Now when you change this heading color it will be applied to the text value even if it's a heading as well as if it's a paragraph. So for example just to show you I'm going to make this like a you know a gray for exercises and we'll notice a very subtle difference here. If we come back to that chapter that I was just in you'll notice that exercises is now a very faint gray rather than a white and examples is now a red on a white background for example. So those are some customization tools that you have they were there previously for regular text but now they work for headings as well. It's not a huge deal but it makes a difference if you're using heading elements inside of text boxes. The next thing that we did and we fixed was we added support for three additional scripts or alphabets. So in pressbooks there is a way that you can declare support for non-Latin alphabets. Many people use alphabets or language systems that use different character sets and so typically to add support for them you would come into the theme options and you would see which fonts that you wanted to add support for. This is important both to allow you to display those typefaces properly and those languages properly in the web book and also to make sure that the characters needed are included when you make an ebook or a pdf export. So in this case we added three. One of them is called Adlem which is a script or language used in Guinea and Senegalbian languages. Another is called Nicole which is also a West African language alphabet and the third is Armenian which is used by people in Armenia. So if I added support for those three languages and I saved the changes here what you'll notice is if I come back to the book you can see in this book here's some script testing. Here's the text this is the I think the UN Declaration of Human Rights being represented in Adlem which is a right to left language Nicole which is also right to left language and Armenian which is a left to right language and if you wanted to you could then come to the export menu and we'll say let's make a EPUB and a pdf export. Without this feature oftentimes what will happen is the missing characters will just display as those little rectangle blocks that look like tofu and so we wanted to make that so it doesn't happen and you'll notice in this book now here you're seeing Adlem being represented as the character set you'd expect and Nicole is the same and Armenian. So those are three additional languages if you are working in those languages or you know people who would like to represent knowledge in any one of those languages that's now possible in press books. We support a lot of text type faces and languages and if there are others that you feel should be represented and are missing let us know and we'd be happy to add them. Another thing that happened is in press books we have a feature we call it shape shifter and it's available with the Malala theme. So if you apply the Malala theme to one of your books it's available here from the theme options. Malala is a really versatile textbook theme that we designed recently. When you come into theme options we have this shape shifter value which means that in the web book you can set custom typefaces for both headers and body elements you can set them separately in the pdf and yet again separately in the ebook. So you could use a whole different set of typefaces for print that you use for the ebook that you use for the web book and this was already possible but there were some users that wanted to be able to use source sans pro and open font in the google fonts library it was very important for them their ebook needed to have source sans pro so we added source sans pro to the list of available typefaces and to use it let's say in this pdf i would say let's set the header font to be i don't know noto or body font to be noto serif and the header font will be source sans pro and then i'll save that change and then i'll export the book and i'll make the pdf and when you view the pdf so here you'll notice this book this typeface is source sans pro and this typeface is noto sans so i just customize the pdf the next change is actually a feature that someone on this call requested thank you sharyl so sharyl said hey you know a lot of times libraries or other publishing organizations are on instagram because that's where the kids that are at these days they're all in the gram so we want to be able to have an instagram link on our network landing page that points to an instagram account that the library or the publishing program may run so previously you could add a facebook link that would look like this you could have a twitter link that looks like this and now you can add an instagram link so that's available just to show you how to get there if you're at your network route and you click on your dashboard you come to appearance and customize you'll see a bunch of customize your choices and one of them here now is a social media link that points to an instagram page so in this case on this network i don't use instagram i but my sister does she has a flower farm in washington and so this points to her flower farm so that's an instagram feature thanks sharyl for the idea and that was really fun for us to build an ad the next thing is also something that was suggested by someone on this call jim parody so thank you for bringing this to our attention jim noticed that the book source attribution statement had a couple of stray values if the publisher was missing so in this case this book is a clone version of american government published using press books there used to be a stray buy here the word buy and it was a space for the publisher but if the publisher is missing there was just a weird grammatical phrase published using press books buy under which didn't make any sense so now if there's no publisher there's no stray buy there if there is a publisher it looks like this this book is a clone version of this book by perva thank you perva great book and published using press books by name of publisher under the license so it's a small change but it makes a difference if you're trying to read a grammatically correct attribution statement did anybody have questions about anything they just saw or anything they'd like to ask in the chat for me to take a deeper dive into hey steel i've got a question on the instagram links yes are those set at the network level so that's one instagram link for your entire catalog or is it available for the author of a book to set individually yeah that's that's available at the network level so the network can have a set of social media links for the press books network itself we don't we don't use the we don't have a social media integration at the book level though you can tweet about a book by clicking the tweet this thing link so that would those would be network that one yeah okay so the next thing that i want to show everyone is a given update on what we've been doing with the lti update so some of you were hearing a call previously so the the basic idea is that we're setting up press books to be able to communicate with your learning management system so you could take press books content you can embed it in the lms and you can exchange great information using the lti advantage or the lti 1.3 specification and so i want to give a quick demo of how you might do that in a live press books book using the canvas learning management system we've been testing this with lms's and so far we've tested it with the five largest lms's and it works similarly in all of them but for demo purposes today i'll be using canvas if you want more details about how it looks in say blackboard or d2l or sakai or moodle we can provide that on request so here this is a sample chapter in a press books book and what i'm going to do here is i'm just going to say paragraph one and then i'm going to insert an h5p activity so i'll do a simple fill in the blanks activity and i'll say paragraph two and i'll make another h5p activity it'll be a true false question and then i have paragraph three so these are activities i've already made and so i've inserted three activities into this chapter i'm going to save this chapter and i'll say okay there's three gradable activities in this chapter when the lti plugin is turned on below that there'll be a space for the instructor to configure this activity as a graded activity and so i'd like to actually do some grade reporting in aggregate for three different activities so my comma key was sticky so i've added three different activities so these three activities have been added to this chapter as an aggregate activity and it tells me it recognized okay activity eight this one had a title it was called language pluralization activity it's a fill in the blanks activity and it's worth a total of six points you can get up to six points for doing this activity the next one's a multiple choice question it's worth one point and the next is a true false question it's also worth one point so in total this should be an activity that students could get score out of eight on and as the instructor i can then say okay when do i want this to be graded so i can set a beginning date and an end date and only attempts within that time period will be included for the grade if i leave it blank there is no limit all attempts will be considered gradable and then i can choose a grading scheme so here what i'm going to start with is i'm going to say first attempt my first attempt will be the one that gets the grade in the grade book so i can do it as many times as i want but the one that goes to the grade book is the first attempt so now that i've configured this activity i'm going to save this here so i have saved a configurable activity what i'm going to demonstrate here in in canvas is how to create the activity manually in the in the lms so here what i would do is i would create a new activity i would select external tool we've already configured press books to be an lti tool here and then i need to paste the actual launch number for this activity i happen to know it but in the future if you needed to you would just be able to paste it from the configuration value and i'll call this demo graded activity and i've added it to my course now i can pretend that i'm a student if i were a student the view would be a little bit different i'd have to publish the activity but i'm logged in as an instructor and student so this ought to work the student would launch the activity in the lms and they would see my press books chapter that has these three activities in them and so i'm going to practice and i will take this activity and i'm going to try to get these ones right and i'm going to get a lot of them wrong so i'll check okay i got four out of six on the first one this true false question let's say it's false i got that one right which answers are correct well it tells me these three so okay so on this i scored six out of eight on this my first attempt if i go to grades you'll see hopefully whoops i didn't configure my assignment properly so i did something wrong where i didn't configure my assignment let's go back to live demos are always a joy let's go back to a different activity that i already did configure properly which was my need occur activity this is a activity that i've set up in press books that has a bunch of learning activities and i did the same way except that i did it right before this activity so here i'm going to take this activity this one is set to be an average of all possible scores so you'll notice right now i have a grade value i want to take it i have a grade value for this activity of 75 and in press books itself it's set up to be the average attempt so i'm going to really bomb this activity and we should see my score drop from a 75 to a little bit lower okay i did that one wrong got that one wrong got that one wrong i got a couple points so it wasn't a total bomb got that one wrong and i got that one right okay so i did okay and then there's a question at the bottom i got that one wrong so now when i come into my grades rather than it being a 75 my grade has just dropped to 62.5 it's averaging all of the attempts that i've made according to the rules that i've set and so what we're seeing here basically is that press books is acting as an aggregator of learning activities and they can display them on a kind of chapter by chapter basis according to fairly complex rules and fairly complex settings if i were to come back into the book here and let's say i were editing this chapter and i removed this very first h5p activity okay i've removed the activity from the chapter and you'll notice down below the grading tells me one or more activities has been removed because it can't be found in the chapter editor it's kind of unfair to assess your students on activities that aren't actually in the chapter that you're assessing them on so we will automatically validate and remove activities if they get taken out of the chapter so for example i could go back and add this this activity back in by adding an h5p i don't remember which one it was i think it was 41 once i save that chapter i can come down and i can restore activity 41 to the graded activity or i could just manually remove it i could say you know what this activity is just for practice i don't actually want to record their grade on h5p activity number 41 let's remove it from the grade value and now when i save this students will only be graded on the question set and the multiple choice and they won't actually be graded on the other activity which was just for practice so the idea here is we want to give instructors and learners maximum flexibility to set up the assessment in a way that makes most sense for their context most of the time we think this is probably best to be used as formative assessment but there are some cases obviously where you might want to do this for slightly higher stakes so i'm going to pause there i think jim raised his hand has a question i just had a quick one on the if you were to remove that h5p activity would it refresh or the grade book because let's say you're mid stream you're like oh this one is being very tough on students i'm just going to remove it really quick will it refresh the averages so to speak in the grade book or would they have to actually what would happen in that regard yeah so so what will happen is the grade has already been reported to the learning management system and in order for that grade report to be updated they would need to generally what would happen with the learner would need to make a new attempt and then we can send them because the lms and the the tool will have to communicate so that if the learner made a new attempt we would faithfully report whatever the grade value was based on that new attempt for that new value so it's generally not a great idea to change your grading scheme after learners have already started taking an activity but but if for example you were doing average score or last score or best score those are three of the options each of those would be updated each time the learner made an attempt based on whatever conditions you as the instructor had set so no perfect yeah this is clearly hypothetical hopefully no one would do that just curious if someone were to do that what we could expect so yeah you would just the the score that the grade value will only be communicated when a new attempt is made so whenever a new attempt has been made well it'll check and say does this should this override the existing score yes or no and if so then it will so Anita yeah so canvas so let me clarify that a little bit I so each of the lms's do support the import of fin common cartridges with lti links the problem right now with most lms's is they assume that the lti tool will be an lti 1.1 tool and so they look and say is there an existing lti 1.1 tool do I have a key secret pair well in this case no we have an lti 1.3 tool and it uses a different authentication method and so the lms sees an lti link and assumes it's using lti 1.1 and then can't find a 1.1 tool and says sorry you don't have a valid configuration what the lms needs to do is to say oh there's an lti link is there an lti 1 tool no is there an lti 1.3 tool yes use lti 1.3 blackboard does that right now but the other lms's haven't yet figured that out and so the the fin common cartridge links will work but only if you're using lti 1.1 in those platforms we expect that they'll fix that because that's a pretty important piece of compliance with how people expect the income and cartridges and lti to work but we're kind of waiting on the lms providers right now so the way that it would work currently needed would be much the same way that most other lti tools work you'd either manually create the external link kind of through the method that I showed there or you could do something called deep linking which is you connect a book and then you pick the activity and add it that way both of those are ways to add lms or lti activities to a course we just think it's much more convenient and faster to add a whole book at once because that certainly saves you a lot of configuration time but right now the lms's are a bit behind on that supporting that the fin common cartridge um jr asked is the connection of pressbooks lti to the lms something that network admins within an institution are able to do or does pressbooks have to enable for each institution's network individually um i'm not sure i understand the question but jr let me show you kind of how the connection works so i'm going to share my screen here and i'll zoom back out so okay so here i'm logged in as a network manager you'll notice there will be at the network level a tab called integrations and you will see the ability to create as many lti consumers as you would like so typically you would create one lti consumer for each of the platforms that are connected to your network a platform in this case would be an lms in most cases there is a single pressbooks network used by one institution and that institution probably has one lms so there are cases where you have more you would probably make a new lti consumer for each lms that you use you can see that we're testing with a bunch of different lms's on one network now but you what you do is you click add new and here your lms will provide a bunch of information from the platform so we have a kind of a kb doc or a walkthrough doc that shows you in canvas where do you get this information and you get it from canvas and you paste it in in moodle where do you get this information in sakai where do you get so you get the information that you need from your learning management system and you paste it in here and then there's a bunch of information that you need from pressbooks that you give to the learning management system and that usually gets established at the lms institutional level so when that happens pressbooks is a trusted lti tool your pressbooks network is a trusted lti tool for your whole installation of the learning management system and then it's a configuration that happens once usually by a pressbook network manager and your lms admin and you can handle it from there and then there's a k id and then you have a bunch of defaults so default values for various settings that you can so you can control these settings and then these settings are also available to be overridden at a book level the settings control things like should you be able to set the user's role when they first launch the lti link and what do you want them to be so for example in this case i want students to write a book collaboratively so when i they launch the lti link i want to make them editors in the book and i could set that setting or i could choose which common cartridge version to use etc the other thing to note about the lti product here this is a paid add-on for pressbooks so this the lti integration wouldn't be included but it could be included for like as a paid add-on um to establish connections for grading great pass back i think there was also a question in the chat earlier about how do people notify users that google analytics has been activated on the site kathy you willing to kind of elaborate on that one and i can take it better crack at it yeah i am so um we've activated google analytics across our pressbooks site how do we how do we tell people that are on the site that they're being tracked i think kathy probably what i would do is if you'd like to let users know that their page visits are being tracked through google analytics i would probably configure your network homepage to say something about that so when your pressbooks your pressbooks visit your website so for example let me just share the screen here you have the ability to make this landing page say whatever you want you can put a little you could put some kind of notice or some kind of information either in the main body or if you want there's a little footer area that's a nice place to notifications and things like that so i'd probably decide where you think it's best or most appropriate and notify people there that you're using google analytics ideas that might be a really good question actually for the edu community of practice because i don't know what other people's practices are other schools and and steel it's the case that you could put a full to s terms of service for readers as a separate page that could be linked in that footer as well if your institution wanted to do that that's a great point and kathy there's a pretty good thread on the edu community practice okay lauren ray and others have been talking about their terms of service policies and what they put up i bet that would be a great question for that okay okay i'll put it in there we have a great privacy statement we just haven't figured out how to make it obvious on the book level so that when the students come to it you know they they see it right off the bat so great thank you friends yeah thanks kathy does anyone else have questions about lti or where we're at and what we're working on there yes still this is chelsea i have a question sure um you did a great job at seeing how like within that chapter you had three activities and you're aggregating them to send back a grade is it possible to send back the grades individually on each activity so the answer is yes it's possible within the lti specification so lti advantage supports something called line item uh so so in that case what what would happen would be you would send an aggregate score and then you could also send the lms information about how that aggregate score was calculated so each of the individual activities we would like to build and develop that and add support for that we haven't done it yet so that's something we'll be working on maybe in the next month but i believe that it's possible we just haven't implemented it yet okay and then with the point values and the assignment dates when that gets configured over on the canvas side they're also able to add kind of override those values that come in right and i guess if you set a date on the prospect side presumably that you know kind of limit of you could only go narrower on the canvas side not wider but like for point values if it comes over from press books as a point value of eight a professor could choose to make that assignment worth 50 points and i assume it would just auto calculate you know based on the percentages yeah so that's a really good question and this is a little bit complicated so i'll try to unpack it what you're saying here is that if i made an assignment here in the canvas course so these are assignments created through press books so for example if i edit this assignment i can put a due date on it but i can't control its availability unless i do like some module release conditions so the the date grade setting is really set in press books but there is the ability to set a point value and the way that lti grade exchange works is a little bit confusing but basically what happens is you saw in press books that there was actually numerical points but what we do when we sum up the value the lms tells us send us the maximum possible points and the actual points received and it turns it into a ratio or a percentage so when the when press books gives a number to the lms it doesn't say oh they scored 10 it says oh it scored 10 out of 12 or five six or 84 point whatever percent or 80 what's five six jonathan is it 86 percent something like that so what would happen would be canvas would receive a percentage value the lms receive a percentage value and then it would scale it to whatever their numerical point value is in the lms so press books will always be sending a proportion or a percentage and the lms will use its point calculation to turn it into a raw number because if that makes sense so for example if i were to set this to 20 the grade would be scaled to be a percentage a ratio of 20 rather than 13 out of 15 it would be 16 out of 20 or whatever the ratio ended up turning out to be if you change how the grade is calculated here in the lms again you'll need to have students resubmit the activity in order for the grade to be updated so if i change this suddenly from 100 to 20 the grades would still show as might i would just be changing the denominator i wouldn't change the numerator like you can see here this this grade used to be set to be out of 20 and earlier i later i changed it to 100 and these students are looking like they only scored 12 or 13 because it was initially base 20 and i changed it to base 100 to kind of explore exactly what you were talking about great thank you the last thing i know we're running a bit short on time i have an update on the press books directory i'm happy to show that but i also wanted to really make sure we left some time for people on the call to share things that were of interest for others in the group or things that they are working on i would say let's hold off on the press books director i'll have even more to show you next time just know that we are working on a directory of a bunch of public press books books from all over the various networks and we're really excited to be able to show you a front end next month's demo will be mostly focused on that and we think it'll be pretty exciting for you to see in the meantime what do you have that you want to share thanks everybody for joining us for the May press books product update we appreciate all that you're doing for open education we appreciate you participating in our software community and all the work that you're doing to advance better education for all thanks so much