 Hi everybody, welcome to the January Pressbooks product update webinar. I'm Steel Wagstaff and I'm going to take you through a bunch of the things that we have released as part of the Pressbooks product in the last couple of months. The first thing I wanted to share actually has to do with the export routine. So you can produce exports in a number of different formats. And the most commonly produced ones are PDF and EPUBs. We refactored and rebuilt the EPUB export. For many, many years we were producing EPUB 2 files with an optional EPUB 3. Now we've done it so that all EPUB exports use the newer EPUB 3.2 specification. This means the EPUBs are more modern and they're better. There's better, I guess is the short way to describe it. What you can do now is if you were to select an EPUB export or PDF export, I'll go ahead and make two for this book. There's a couple of other changes that we made when we refactored and improved these exports that will be of interest for you. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'll show you a new PDF file. This book that I'm looking at here is a big complicated book that has lots of different chapters. And within those chapters, it has a two level table of contents. But you can see here, there's front matter. There's a part. This is a chapter. And within the chapter, they have section headings. So this book really has at least three levels of content. And when we produce digital PDFs, we want to make sure that the digital PDF to be fully accessible has a table of contents and an index that shows you the actual structure of the book. So that was something that we changed and improved with the most recent releases of press books. So here I'm opening this PDF that I've just downloaded here. And you'll notice in most of your PDF viewers, you'll have something like this that gives you a document outline. The new document outline has been improved to actually represent the structure of the book. So here is front matter. You can see here's the table of contents. And we're going to expect a part, a chapter, a sub-chapter. And here you'll see here's the part. It's the top level. Underneath it, you'll see the chapters. And here's an example of a chapter that has subheadings. And you'll see those are structured as subheadings within the chapter. So the table of contents now has been in the PDFs, has been improved to show the actual structure of the book. And so has the document outline for the book. We've improved the PDF accessibility for that. Another thing you'll notice is let's go to this chapter here. There are places in a book where we can't display interactive content, whether it's an embedded video or a H5P activity or an audio file. And every time that we're excluding an interactive element, we're now going to give you not just a link to the chapter, but an anchored link to where in the chapter that content occurs. So that's kind of a minor change, but it does make a difference. So for example, this was a YouTube video. And if I were to click this link now, it will take me directly to that chapter and it will take me to the embedded element that was excluded. The same thing would have happened for that H5P activity or for the audio element. So those are some minor improvements that we think will make a difference for both accessibility and usability of the EPUB and the PDF exports. So the other things that we did were we have made a handful of improvements to just general accessibility for the interface. And I want to show you some of those. So we, every year or every two years, we have hired the group at OCAD University that work on accessibility. It's a service called WebSavvy to do a full accessibility audit of both the press books authoring platform and the reading interface. And so each time they do that, they do a full scrub of everything and tell us any issues for general accessibility that we can fix and improve to clean things up. We also worked out for a couple of several months with actually Lauren and her colleagues at the University of Washington to do something similar. But every time we do an audit, we learn new things and we see new things that could be improved. So one of the things that we've changed is if you look at the book, the web book homepage, you'll notice that there are several places in the book information or in the metadata where there are links. So instead of just encoding the link with color, we're now making sure that they're always going to be underlined for double encoding. So that's just a relatively minor change, but it's one that makes a difference for people that have different visual perception. A similar thing was done at the actual, let's see, let me go to the right place, at the actual network level. So here's an example of a network homepage that has links in the content. Those links are now going to be underlined so that you can tell visually that their links not just by color, but by visual indication. And you'll see at the bottom in the footer, links will be underlined upon hover for accessibility. So those are a couple of accessibility fixes and changes that we made. We also made a change in the admin interface to something called the publish menu. This is not the most widely used tool in the world, but sometimes people will have published the book and want it to be for sale somewhere. So there is a menu here in Pressbooks that says publish, and you can list the URL for all of the different places that your book is for sale. We improved the accessibility of this menu so that these fields all have the right labels so that if you're using a screen reader, you know exactly what field you're filling in when you fill in the Amazon URL field. And we updated and improved the guide chapter for using this page to indicate where the book has been published. Okay, so the question in the chat was, I've never used this before. Where does the link show up if you add it? So I'm going to add a sample link to Amazon and I'll just add a link to pressbooks.org as other service. If I click save changes, what will happen is on the web book homepage, when you visit the book, you'll see a new button that says buy book. And when you click buy book, or if you were to read your book, you'll also see here there's a link in the top right that says buy. If you click this, it takes you to a page that just shows you all of the links that you've entered in. So it tells you you can buy this book at any of the links. So here's the Amazon link that I entered. Here's the buy more link here for pressbooks.org. So that's how that published feature works and where that information displays if you choose to use it. There were a handful of bugs that we fixed. One of them is for network managers. In pressbooks, network managers have a tool that allows them to see a kind of book list. And there's the ability here. Let me just find a couple of books that I don't need anymore. I've got two books that I'm ready to delete. There's a bulk action that allows you to delete books in bulk and that button was broken. So we fixed it. So now when you click bulk delete, you'll say you're about to delete these three sure. And I say yes, I'm sure. And the deletion procedure will actually complete. So thank you for those of you who reported that was broken. There was a minor JavaScript issue and now that's been fixed. So you can now both delete books from your book list page again. We also improved the character encoding on EPUB exports and the table of contents. It's kind of a minor thing. I don't need to show it, but it's just working. It's better. And we made some changes to improve the API so that cloning and other kinds of operations are smoother and have fewer possibilities of error. Yeah. So Rama asked in the chat when I was talking about that publish feature earlier. What's the intention for the other service URL? This is really like let's say you maybe have your book for sale through a print on demand service or through your library bookstore or some other book sale service that isn't one of these big five that we list here. It's just a chance for you to put any other URL where people can find and purchase a print copy of your book. Yeah, that's the intention for that. So Lulu, for example, is another big service that Rebus and others have used for print on demand. Lulu wasn't, I think, a big print on demand service when we first built this feature and it has become one. So that's the kind of space that you can use for that. We've made a bunch of changes to our product that we call results for LMS. And what results for LMS is it allows you to connect a press book book to your learning management system and send grade information from press books to your LMS if you've included interactive H5P activities. So here's an example. I will come to a chapter in press books in this book and let's say we pick this chapter here. Here's a chapter that somebody's already built and it includes multiple H5P activities. I've turned on this feature in press books here and you'll see down below there is a box now which will automatically show you all of the available activities for your chapter without you having to enter them manually. And you can see whether they have a maximum score or not. None of these activities have maximum scores, which means I need to attempt them and then the maximum score would be given. And so here's an activity that I could attempt. It's a drag and drop activity. If I click this link, it will open the activity as a logged in user and I'll be able to try this activity. I'm not really sure how this one works, but okay, I tried it. I got a one out of 10. Now if I come back and I click update this, you'll see the maximum score for this is 10 and I can include it in my school report. So basically what we've done is we've just simplified the UI here. So it's much easier for an instructor to configure this for use the first time. There's also an include all button which would if you had multiple activities include them or remove them all. So you'll see in a second it's been removed or you could manually add it back. As before, there's a beginning date, ending date, great scheme and whether this is a canvas activity and how many points it's possible. So I've just saved the configuration and I've configured this chapter for grading much, much faster than I would have been able to do previously. So those are some UX UI improvements that we made. Thank you for the, we had several people from your institutions, some of your institutions piloting this and instructors gave us some really valuable feedback for how to improve this product. Another change that we made for results for LMS would we improve the settings that are available for people at the book level. So here at the book level, you'll see I'll just throw in my changes. You see that if results for LMS is enabled, you have the old LTI configuration settings and then down here, there's a new set of default values that you can both set globally and override globally for your book. So let's suppose you have 10 chapters in your book that you want to grade and in your particular course, you always want to use the best attempt for students. First, I'm going to save the default, which means any time I make a new chapter, the default value will be best attempt. And you can see that if I were to say, let's create a new chapter. And I'll call this test chapter and I'm going to add just one H5P activity. It's a question set and create this chapter. Here you'll notice, okay, my grade reporting here, here's my grade and you can see that the grade scheme was set to best attempt because that's my book default. The problem in this case may have been I already configured a bunch of chapters, which were not best attempt. This one maybe was, sorry, I got to scroll a little bit. This one was actually average attempt. And if I want to make them all uniform in my book, I can now come back to the settings and say, okay, this is set to best attempt. If I click this button, apply to existing content and then save. Now, when I come back and refresh that other chapter, where is it at? You'll notice that the grade scheme was changed from average to best attempt. So I can both set defaults for new attempts and I can also apply these defaults to all of the content in my book separately. The same thing is possible where I can designate that a chapter is an assignment. So all new chapters would automatically be assignments. And I can also change the points possible value. So let's say I want it to be 15 for all of the chapters rather than 10 or rather than whatever. If I apply this to existing content, again, what's going to happen is the value that was previously 10 here will now be changed throughout the book. And you'll see my new points possible for this was 15 and it's now considered an assignment. So we hope that those changes there. I know it's a little bit confusing if you haven't used the product, but those changes we think is going to make it a lot easier and faster for people to configure these chapters for grading in their LMS. In addition to those changes, we've really overhauled the documentation for this for how to configure and use this tool. And we're very, very grateful for the people who gave us very detailed user feedback. So if you go to the network manager guide, you'll now see this chapter here. It has very detailed instructions for how to configure the plugin and the results for LMS product with your LMS. There's specific details for the four LMS is that we've done this with. And we also have created videos now short videos that take you through that whole process. So if you're first configuring this with your LMS, there's now better documentation and videos. There's updated documentation for how to use the tool that I just explained. All of the stuff that I just showed you is now in our documentation and videos either have been created or are coming for all of those steps. So if you have used results for LMS, thank you for being pilots. If you haven't and would like to pilot it, John, who's in this call in the chat is collecting instructors and institutions who want to participate in a no cost pilot. Or you can talk with them about the purchase options if you're already in your client. OK, the last thing that I should mention is if you are an institution that uses Moodle as your LMS Moodle was having some issues with core Moodle with identifying and registering LTI links properly upon first load. And so we hired a Moodle core developer to write an open source Moodle plugin, which actually fixes this and makes it so that when you do a common cartridge import, Moodle links will just work. If you're an institution that uses Moodle and wants to use the results for LMS product, let us know. There is this open source plugin that we have developed and we're maintaining now that will fix that issue in Moodle. And we hope in the future that this will become a part of Moodle core. We'd like to contribute it to the core Moodle project, but for now you have to do it if you're a plugin. So let us know if you're a Moodle institution and that's relevant to you and we'll help you use this open source plugin or Moodle that we developed. That was what I wanted to share about the results product. The last part of this is kind of the most fun for me. It's showing you a preview of what's coming next. So we've been working on a development contract for Ecampus Ontario and some of the products and features that we've been developing for them will be broadly useful for everyone. And the first and most exciting I think for many people are some changes that we're making for how users can see information about how frequently their book is viewed. So we have built an integration with the plugin tool that's called CocoAnalytics. The reason we like CocoAnalytics is what this does is it gives you user privacy respecting book traffic information for both your site as a whole and each individual book on the site by default. So if you are using Pressbooks right now, you'll see that this exists. You'll also see a warning message that we're going to remove very soon because it is fully functional. But here's a demo for this particular Pressbooks network at the root level. There's an analytics tab and this will show me here how many visitors I have had over a given time period. It will also show me the most common refers to my website and which pages on the network site get the most traffic. So in this case, the home page of my network is the most frequently visited. It's been visited by 70 people for a total of 136 page views over the last month. If you wanted to change that time frame, you could come up here and you could say show me the last quarter. And you can see now that I've had 70 visitors, 136 page views. I could also look because this quarter happens to just be January, but I could look at the last quarter and then number would change and you'd be able to see. OK, so there's a dashboard here that will show you page view information about your network itself and about any of your books. So, for example, let me go to a sample book on this network and I'll go to the analytics page here. And here this is not a very widely visited book, but you would see the same thing at the book level. This is available to anyone who has a book and on a Pressbooks network. It's now a core part of the product for the next few days. You will probably see an alert or a message at the top that says it requires a cron talk to your network manager. We are removing that notice because it is working properly, but it won't be removed until our next production deploy. So you're seeing a sneak preview. If you're a network manager, I probably wouldn't tell my users about this feature until next week's production deploy. But you can go ahead and look at this and take a look and kind of start to explore some of these interesting insights into page view traffic. This has been running on Pressbooks more or less consistently for the last couple of months. So you'll have a few months of accurate data, but the data will be most accurate from the start of the year till now. The way that this works is it will keep track of page views in the actual Pressbooks database without using a third party service. And generally it does it without storing information about the user. So it tries to do it in a privacy non-invasive way. Many people, many of you like to use Google Analytics for this. You can, of course, configure a Google Analytics integration. Google Analytics collects a lot of information about the user that they may not want to share with you or that you may not want to collect. And this is a way to do it. It's built in at the book level that isn't as intense on user privacy. So that's a feature that we've added and will be available very, very soon. It's working now, but there may be some questions from users about that notice. So maybe wait till next week to tell people that it exists. And cool. Yeah. So there isn't information about the information that's collected. But if you were to look at this plugin, you can see right now we have a cookie policy and a privacy policy where that's described. You have some settings where you can exclude page views from logged in users. And you can also decide whether or not you want to use to set a cookie, which allows you to determine whether that person is a unique visitor or not. Usually we'd recommend leaving it on just so that you don't get. If you turn it off, your user count between visitors and page views will be off because it needs that cookie to know whether the person has visited previously or not. It doesn't collect any information about who the person is. It just says, oh, you are the same person. You don't have to use that cookie. If you turn it off, it will still work. You're just your visitor count won't be accurate anymore because we won't know that it's the tool won't know it's a returning visitor. And then you can also set your default date period and you can decide to automatically flush information after a certain amount of time. If you choose at the book level or your network level, so there's some settings available. We think it's a pretty nice tool and we think that you'll like it and that it will satisfy the needs of a lot of your authors. If you have questions about it or how operates beginning next week, you can always ask us a premium support and we'll have some documentation available in our next release notes about this. Shane at the network level. Yeah, so we don't aggregate book information at the network level in this tool. So what I'm saying what's available at the network level. This analytics is just for your root site, which would be your homepage and its child pages. It doesn't collect and display all of the child sites in one location. That's not a feature that we added for that so far. So if you wanted to do a big aggregate thing like that, Google Analytics is probably still the best for now. I'll cover this again next in the next product update when it's actually live and we'll go a little bit more in depth. The other cool thing that I wanted to show is a cloning feature that many of you have requested. So here's an example of a book where I have added a custom theme. So this is the Malala theme that I've applied for this book and you can see in theme options. I've done a bunch of configuration. I really wanted to make this book look special. So I changed the heading example colors and I'm choosing to do a two level table of contents in the web book. I've chosen a separate header and body font and I've made the web book wide and I've indented paragraphs in the PDF options. I've changed a bunch of these things and made them all custom. So I'm saying book author book author. So this book has really done a bunch of things to customize its settings, its theme options and this book has also added custom styles. So it's going to make all of my chapter headings read, for example. So here's a book that's got some modifications, right? Historically, when we cloned this book, we only cloned the content and we didn't ever touch any of the theme information. But many users would like the book to be a lookalike clone, not just a content clone. And so as of next week, when we release the next version of press books, we will check and say, what version, what theme version does this book use? And do you have the same theme version on your press books network? If so, we will clone the theme, all of the theme options and any custom styles. So I will show you what that looks like here on our test network. So I'm going to clone this book, I'll enter the URL, I'll call this theme cloning test and I will clone the book. So our cloning routine will operate as normal. And then as I said, at the end of the clone, we will check that the themes are the same version of the theme exists. And the new message now says, yay, the source books theme, theme settings and custom styles were successfully applied. If we can't find a matching version of the theme, we'll tell you, we're sorry, we couldn't find version theme X on your network. Contact your network manager to learn more about theme availability. That's mainly going to be a message for users of our open source networks. Or if you're trying to clone from an open source network, they may not be keeping the themes up to date or maybe using different themes. So that's just how we're going to handle that. But if you're on one of our EDU networks, they'll always be running the same version of the themes and they'll be the most up to date version. So this feature should always work if you're going from one of our hosted networks to another hosted network. Let me show you then what that looks like here. Here's my clone book. And if you were to look at appearance, you'll see the theme. Oh, it's already Malala. And if I look at theme options, you'll see those green colors that I selected are all there. If I go to my PDF options. So here are the old PDF options. 10, 8, 1, 4 trade. 10, 8, 1, 4 trade. Oh, it's identical. And you'll even notice that custom styles, that red rule that I wrote, that was also cloned over to the clone book. Now, once the book has been cloned, you can, of course, change all of those in the clone book without affecting the parent book. But that's going to be included as part of the cloning routine for the first time. This has been on our backlog for years and years. And I think people are going to be really excited about that. We're very excited about it. Thank you Ecampus Ontario for suggesting it and funding the development of this. The last thing that I want to share that is going to be coming. This is still a little bit of a ways away, but we're building it free campus Ontario. If you were to go to book info, there's going to be a new field. That will be available where you will be able to select the institution or institutions, meaning colleges, universities where this book was created or who sponsored the creation. This is slightly different than publisher. Many of you will list the publisher. But for example, you may want to say, this is a consortium press books network. Like in next case, there are several technical colleges in Wisconsin are building these books together. Or an Ecampus Ontario case, we started with Ecampus Ontario. And you'll be able to choose from any of the Ontario institutions. So let's say Algonquin College and University of Toronto. And who else collaborated on this? So there's three institutions. This will function a lot like the way that the subject headings work. You'll be able to choose an institution from a list of controlled vocabulary list. Once I save that information, this institution information will then be available on the book's homepage. In the metadata section, you can see here's the institutions that I've applied. I'm going to then also add this book to my network catalog and show you the next piece that's coming for this. So what you can see here is that the institutions will appear on the catalog. And there's also a filter here that will let you filter by institution and only display books that were created or produced by your institution. So we think this will be a big improvement for the consortium networks, press networks. It's not quite ready for release yet, but it's coming. And we have a proof of concept that we're going to be prototyping and testing out with Ecampus Ontario in the coming weeks. Hopefully you'll be able to see a fully functional feature for that in our next product update. And if you have ideas or thoughts or feedback about that feature, we're all ears. And obviously we'll be wanting to talk to some of the consortium clients and make sure what we build meets their needs. So the way that it's generated approval, we're still going to solve this problem kind of more globally, but we're going to be maintaining probably the idea would be we will be maintaining a controlled vocabulary and authority record of all of the colleges and universities, the known colleges and universities, ultimately in the world. We're starting with the United States, Canada, Australia, and that's the list we have right now. Right, right, right, right now, we're starting with the list. The school is in Ontario. And then probably what we'll end up doing would be at the network level, the network manager can decide which geographical region they want to make available or all of them. I mean, most people won't need like all 10,000 universities in the world because they're they're serving maybe the state of Arizona or the province of Ontario or the country of Argentina, for example. But those are the kinds of things that we're envisioning doing. So it will involve us maintaining a list of institutions and we'll have a place where you say, I don't see my institution to be a form where you can fill it out quickly. And we'd be able to review that it is, in fact, a real university added to the list and push that pretty regularly as needed. That's the thinking for now. OK, I'm done with my demo part. Does anybody else have questions they want to ask about anything that we showed? I just want to thank everybody for attending our January product update. We'll be back again at the end of February last Thursday to share more updates and future releases. Thank you all for the work you do in open education communities and we'll talk soon.