 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the November Pressbooks Monthly Product Update. I'm still waxed down to the product owner, and I want to give people an update for what we've been working on and what we've been learning over the last month. A really big focus for us over the last month has been what we're calling the Pressbooks Results Pilot. In that pilot, we have been inviting a whole bunch of instructors to use our LTI tool with embedded H5P activities, and to produce graded score reports, and start to visualize some of the details of what students are doing as they conduct those activities. And we have really learned a lot through the course of the pilot. Some of the things we learned have been really interesting and really exciting, and some of the things have been really hard and frustrating and difficult, and part of the results pilot has been encountering some failure points and some points that we need to adjust and improve before we proceed further with the pilot. So I will kind of try to summarize some of the big things that we've learned and what we're going to do about them. One of the big things that we learned or we encountered was when we built the LTI plug-in initially, we were using a library provided by IMS Global or One EdTech. And unfortunately, we've encountered a bunch of limitations or problems with that library, and it's not been, I don't think, maintained or updated to the standards that our developers wanted as they were using it. And it's been a source of frustration or concern for our development team. And so what they proposed and what we've encountered some kind of intractable problems with the library, and so our team decided that we should refactor or rebuild the entire LTI core plug-in using a different, better, more supportable PHP library. And so it's a pretty massive undertaking, but it's meant essentially rebuilding the whole architecture of the underlying LTI plug-in with a different library. And that has consumed a big portion of the team's energy for the last month, and will probably consume a big chunk of their energy for the next month. But the positive thing I have to share is that progress on that is going really well. We have a migration planner path. So if you have already activated or are using the core LTI features, meaning you've set up an LTI consumer with your network and your CI links or LTI launches, we have a migration plan when the new plug-ins released, it will just be seamless and smooth and we'll be coordinating that with you in the coming months. If you're using the advanced grade passback and grading features, it will be a little bit more complicated and we'll need to have a deeper discussion with you, but we have a pretty good handle on people that have been doing the results pilot. Some positive, exciting things I guess to share about the refactor. As we do the rebuilt plug-in and we're using a different library, we will be supporting something that's called a dynamic registration. And if you use D2L Brightspace, Moodle or Blackboard or Sakai as your LMS, dynamic registration means that registering press books as an LTI tool is really like one or two steps. You provide a URL and the tool and the platform exchange all the information they need to be able to have a secure connection. And then as a press books LTI administrator, you just go into your list of LTI tools and you decide whether you wanna activate or approve the tool that the platform that's just been registered. That's gonna be a game changer and make it a lot simpler and easier to register LTI tools. The kind of unfortunate news is if you are at Canvas School, Canvas doesn't yet support dynamic registration and so you can't use dynamic registration, but what we have added is in Canvas, they do support you adding a URL endpoint that has much of the configuration information done there. So it will make the platform registration tool a lot faster. You still have to do manual entry in the press books platform, but we think it will cut in half the time and reduce the number of manual entry errors by 90% or something like that for people who are registering the platform in first time. So if you haven't yet connected LTI and wanna do registration, the new plugin will make that much easier, much faster and smoother for people. And I'll try to demonstrate that I think at our next monthly product update. I'm guessing it'll probably be in January because of the holidays, but we'll have something soon and I'll show you that flow and we'll produce videos and documentation and all of that. The other thing that we're working on that will be part of the new LTI plugin will be a revised and simplified version of the common cartridge export and import routine. What this is, is it's a method that allows you to decide which of the chapters or parts of your book that you'd like to have as LTI links and then to bring them smoothly or safely into your LMS. So currently in our current plugin, when we were building this feature initially, we thought that all of the LMS providers would support the same version of common cartridge. And in sad experience, we found that they don't. Moodle supports one version, Blackboard D12 support another and Canvas supports a third even though they're pretty similar. And so we ended up making three different flavors of common cartridge export that were basically identical but different for each LMS. And then if you were supporting one LMS at your school, you had to select this option and it just got a little bit too complicated. And so what we've decided to do is really simplify that and make a single common cartridge export format that will work for all LMSs which reduces the level of complexity. So like no matter what LMS you use, they'll be the same flavor of common cartridge export and it'll work in the same way. All right, first what I'll show is I have a book here in press books that's using the new LTI plugin tool that we have. And what you'll see here is under other formats, there'll be a common cartridge LTI links option. There won't be separate ones for Moodle, D12, Canvas or Brightway. So it'll just be a single option and it will produce a standard common cartridge file when you click this option and click export. This is what's called an IMS CC format file. It's an IMS common cartridge. You download it locally to your computer and then from the course that you wanna bring it into I'll just use this test course and let me go ahead and empty it out. I'm gonna reset the course. The process then looks like this. You come to import course content. You provide the file that you want to use and then you say you can select all content or just specific content. In this case, I'll do all content and we'll say import. Canvas will go through the import process. It will bring that content in to your course and then you'll see these are newly created LTI links that came from this book. So if I went to this book and I would show you, you would see in this book, there is an introduction and two chapters, the introduction and both chapters. I have LTI links now created in press books. What this means is that I or a student were to launch this. I'll go ahead and make sure I published this course and just show you the student view real fast. So I published the course and I'm now in student view. If a student were to launch this link, what they would see would be they still appear to be in the LMS. They're experiencing from the LMS and this is a secure LTI launch that will load that press books content, the live version of that in their LMS as soon as the screen catches up with me. So you can see, okay, I'm still in the course. I can do other things from the course, but here is that press books chapter that's been loaded and launched in my LMS. And that will work uniformly with whatever LMS you're using. It will use both public and private content and we have a bunch of other features that will be coming and that will be available when the new plugin is refactored. One of those is something called support for deep linking. Deep linking is another method by which you can bring content from press books into the LMS. So the idea here is from press books, if you didn't wanna do that common cartridge export import, there would be a press books launch link and it would be a content selector button. You would say select content and then it would show you all of the books that you have access to as an instructor. You'd be able to expand the button and you would be able to then see which of the chapters or links that I want to bring in and it would do the exact same thing. Whichever ones you selected, it brings them in and then you have working LTI links in your course for the content you've selected. We think this will be really exciting. We think it'll make just the LTI great or the loading of content in your LMS a lot easier with simplifying all of those processes and our dev team is excited because we're using a library that's well supported that's being updated and can comply with all of the specifications and standard needed for standard LTI. I know that was a little bit technical and LTI is not maybe an acronym that all of you are dealing with every day. So I do wanna pause here and take any questions large or small about any of the things that I just described there. So the second big thing that we've learned about the results pilot has to do with some H5P limitations and also what we're able to understand and store about learner records. One of the problems that we encountered that was a really difficult sticky problem was in order to use the grade pass back, you have to configure each individual chapter for grading because the chapter is what sends the grade score in press books. In press books, chapters can include multiple H5P activities and they can include automatically graded H5P activities as well as H5P activities that aren't automatically graded. They can include simple H5P activities like a single true-false question or compound H5P activities like a quiz, a question set or an interactive video that has multiple assessments. Now in the course of doing this pilot we've learned that simple compound activities are pretty different and that some compound activities are automatically graded every time and some might be automatically graded if they have gradable assessments and others might not be if they don't have gradable assessments. A problem that we encountered so far is that in order to configure your chapter for grading, we need to know, does it have automatically graded assignments in it? And we can't know that ahead of time with the way that H5P is currently configured. Because some activity types are automatically graded and others aren't depending on how they've been created and configured by the user. In addition, when the H5P activities created we currently don't have visibility into how many points it's worth until it has been attempted by a logged in user. And one of the consequences of that was it was a really time consuming tedious process for anyone who wanted to configure the chapter for grading. They had to make the H5P activities, they'd embed them in the chapter. Then they had to attempt them as logged in users. Then they had to configure the chapter for grading by choosing which ones they wanted to include. Then they had to import and bring the content in as a graded assignment and configure it further and beyond us. It was just too many steps and too complicated to be really worth the value that people got out of it. And so we paused that part of the pilot and we said, you know, there's not a viable simple workaround for us to make this user friendly. And so rather than inviting new people to go through the pain and experience of this, we're gonna take a step back and say, what is it that instructors really do want or need from this? Maybe it's not to be able to configure the whole chapters of graded activity. Maybe it's what we're learning is they wanna see the individual results of the activities but the single high level aggregate with the grade in the LNS is not providing as much value as we initially believed. Especially consider all the painful effort needed to get there. Another really difficult problem that we hit and encountered was H5P when embedded in press books does not natively know or care which chapter it was embedded in. It just knows that it was in a WordPress site. We care a lot which chapter it was embedded in because that's where we're trying to aggregate the score in the grade because we're trying to hook into H5P's grade or like reporting mechanism to store that information. We had to actually kind of hack in a creative way to find out what chapter it was embedded in. And it turns out that Safari and Apple devices block the method that we're using to find out what chapter it's embedded in as a security feature. And so students who were using the Safari browser or were launching activities from iPads and iPhones couldn't successfully submit scores even when they were doing the activities correctly. And that was a pretty big and massive barrier. Like there are workarounds. Don't use an Apple device or don't use a Safari but that just isn't acceptable for us as a production feature that we would use or that we would have our clients to use. And so we need to re-approach that and need to find some solution probably working with H5P which of course is not our software or our code. And those are the two big showstoppers that we hit that have caused us to pause taking new people into the results pilot until we can step back and work around those. The positive side I guess for all of this is that we've learned a ton about how to store detailed information about the attempts that students have made in H5P activities. And we've made some really good progress in being able to visualize those and to use LTI as a way of doing it. One of the ideas that we have is this is just a hot so we've gone back, we're talking with instructors finding out what they want and would want to use and what would be valuable to them rather than focusing on the specific implementation. And one of the ideas we have is something that would look a little bit more like this. So we're in the design stage. The idea would be in press books itself we can keep track of every attempt made by a logged in user in our database and we could provide a visualization that kind of looks like a grade book but for press book chapters. So in the top left you'd imagine this would be a specific press book chapter and we would have a dropdown that would let you see I want to see student scores for the first attempt student scores for their best attempt or student scores for the average attempt. And then if you change that this view would be dynamically updated. We could show you all of the students in your course as well as a class average. And then for each individual H5P activity that was embedded in the chapter we could give you a high level overall score as well as the overall score for all of the activities in the chapter. This would be something that we could provide as a launch link via LTI for press books and then the idea would be a drill down where if you wanted to say, so let's say this was a four question quiz and I wanted to know more about what students were getting right or wrong on that quiz I could then say drill down deeper into the activity or get an insights page that shows me for this chapter what are the questions that students are struggling with most what are the activities students having the biggest problem with? We're still at the kind of discovery and design stage for this but that's sort of how our thinking has been evolving and what we're asking people to do is rather than pilot and use the existing product that has these known problems or limitations they can if they really, really want to but we just think that the pain and the issues are probably not worth the value gained. What we really want to do is just do more discovery words and say instructors especially those of you who have been making interactives what is it you want to know? What's most valuable to you? And help us do some of the design thinking and the design work. So Michelle are you X UI designer and I and other people from press books team will be contacting any of the instructors that have told us they want to pilot this and do more of that design discovery thinking before we build the next iteration of what this looks like. And that's the update I wanted to give on press books results. A lot of this was obviously disappointing and hard for us because we didn't want to pause the pilot we didn't want it to fail in the ways that it failed but also we appreciate the flexibility that people have shown the graciousness and learning new things is always valuable even if what you've learned is not what you hoped you'd learn I guess is the takeaway. That was a lot there. I'm happy to take questions or a pause and kind of answer anything that you might want to have answered about what's happening with the LTI and press books results and the pilot. The next thing I want to show is kind of a preview of coming attractions and it's pretty exciting as well especially for institutions that are managing press books network that's shared by more than one institution or school. So this has come out of work that's being sponsored or funded by Ecampus Ontario. If Ecampus Ontario is a very large provincial organization that's running a pretty enormous press books network that's shared by I think upwards of 50 individual schools and colleges in the province. And as they've grown they've had a number of issues or problems where being able to manage a network that's that large and used by that many people has some bottleneck problems for the network administrators. Probably a lot of you can relate where you're like, wow our program's grown so successful that I'm the major bottleneck on this like I can't keep up with all the books and users and projects. I'm just one person or we're just three people. They wanted to be able to see more visibility into institutional use and have tools to share and administer press books on a large consortium network at the institutional level. And so we've contracted with them to or we're contracting with them to build a set of tools to help you manage a consortium network and keep track of institutions a bit better. And we're at the design stage now and I have some designs that I wanna show and an invitation for anyone who'd like to be involved in shaping the future of this. So Michelle and I have worked on what we call fat marker sketches and I'll just show a few of the interfaces that there we go. So these are called fat marker sketches and these are the interfaces that we are planning to build and we'll be working with clients to refine as we build these features in. The first idea is that on a press books network we don't have any native concept of an institution right now. Initially each network was owned by one institution so we didn't have this idea of many institutions on the same network. So the first thing that we'll be adding would be an institution list. And this would display a custom list of any institutions that might be sharing a single press books network. In the case of Ecampus, Ontario would be all the colleges in Ontario. In the case of Indiana, Kevin, you might say are you Bloomington, are you Kokomo, are you whatever or in the case of Washington you might have UW Bothell, UW Seattle, UW have you. You'd create the institution name and the institution could have one or more email domains and this will be useful later when I talk about users. We're also gonna create a new role that would be called institutional admin. Rather than having like full God powers for the whole network, they would be a little demigod. They would be able to administer books and users that belong to their institution only. So they would be like a network manager but for an institution in a larger network. So that would have a name and email address and network managers, you who run the whole network would be able to give and remove that power to users on your network. It would also display the number of books that are owned by that institution on your network and the number of users that are associated with that institution on your network as well as book limits and user limits if they've been set by the terms of your contract. So some consortium networks say, oh, this institution has 10 books dedicated to them and then it would keep track of that and display it here. From this page, there'd be a button to allow you to add a new institution and it'd be a really simple modal or simple field. You'd have the name of the institution, the email domains you wanna associate with it and then a selector that lets you pick a user from your network and assign them as an institutional admin or remove them as an institutional admin. The book limit and user limit would be set by us as press books by the super admins based on the terms of your contract. So it would be grayed out for you if you're a network manager but you would still see the value if you went to the edit page. So if you were to, we have some flows and designs here for how to create and edit institutions. Any questions or things that people wanna ask about that kind of basic functionality before I move on to the next stage? All right, so the next thing would be once you have institutions, then you need to be able to associate users to belong to the institution. If you have a thousand users, those users at the beginning would all be unaffiliated or belong to the consortia. But then you would need to be able to have a tool that lets you find them and associate them with their institution if you want them to belong to a specific institution. So the idea is we would display the username, the name and the email address and then what institution they belong to whether it's something or unassigned. You'd have a menu where you could bulk select, you could search. So usually you're probably gonna be filtering based on email domain. That's how you're gonna know what institution they belong to. So let's say you typed in uoregon.edu and you see everybody with the uoregon email address. I bulk select and I select Oregon from that list and then apply and it would then associate those users with the institution. As a network manager, you can still administer and see them from your user list. But they would then become visible in the user list of the institutional manager who'd be able to help those people and they'd be associated with that user account. The second thing is something very similar but for books. So the idea here would be we would display the cover of the book, the name and the URL of the book and what institution owns the book. Any book project can be owned by a single institution or be owned by the consortium or be unassigned. In order to help you make the determination we would then show you also who are the book admins and what institution do they belong to. Because you may not know like who's working on this book I'm not sure but if all three people are from Puget Sound then you're like, oh that book belongs to Puget Sound. Pretty easy for me to assign it to Puget Sound. And those are the kind of basic interfaces and initial tools that we'll be building that would be new to press books. The idea here is at the end of this you should be able to use press books as a multi-institution consortia and administer rights and permissions to help you administer the network really easily. You should be able to have visibility into usage across institutions. And you should be able to manage all of those things yourself as a network manager or have press books help you keep track of institutions however you like. And the same kind of book list, user list and statistics that we now provide at the whole network level would be then possible to do at the institution level as well so you can have the roll up view of the whole consortia as well as individual data views or book usage and user usage at individual institutions that would be dynamic and available to both network admins and institutional admins. I know that may not be relevant for those of you that are just single institution users but if you're watching this recording and you're a consortial user, that's what we're working on. Okay, so what's happening now is we're turning these fat marker sketches into what we call wireframes which means we're using templating software called Figma and Michelle will build interactive views of what I just showed you as a paper sketch. It won't be working software but it will be a thing that you can view, interact with and see what these flows look like and how they might behave before we actually build them in press books. At this stage of the design process, we take those wireframes and we share them with a bunch of clients who'd like to see them, like to understand it and give feedback on it. We have reached out to all of our big consortial clients and have invited them individually to participate in this feedback stage. If you are also interested and would also like to see those Figma files and give feedback, we'll be sharing it at the next monthly product update but you can also let me know or let us know and we'd happily include you in the co-designing process if you'd like to be involved in seeing those wireframes and giving feedback before we start building this as a working feature in press books. And that's kind of a model that we use for a lot of development. And so this is a good chance if you wanna see what it's like to work with us on designing larger features, this is a good opportunity to do so. You can let me know in the chat or by email or contact Michelle or I and we're happy to involve you as much or as little as you'd like in the design stage of this before it's implemented. Our target and goal is to have this as fully working, fully functional, all of these pieces. The end of March is the delivery deadline for the development contract that we have for campus Ontario. And we think it'll be consuming a lot of effort and energy for us probably through December, January, probably anywhere as well. So that's a little bit of a preview of some big features that are coming in the world. You know, I'm open to any questions you have about press books and the product or roadmap or goals before we jump into the community roundtable. Sure, I'm just wondering in terms of the book information, if it's possible for institutional information to be included within that, maybe as a notes field or something. And also maybe whether we can control visibility of it. Yeah, well, let me take the first part of that question and then I'll have to come back on the visibility thing to make sure I understand you. So currently in press books, we have already added the ability to indicate contributing institutions to the book info metadata. And I'll show you that feature right now. This is slightly different from what I was just describing with institutional management. But if you've made a book, you have all these metadata fields that you can enter. One of the metadata fields is the publisher. And this is the publisher of records. So we might say steel press. And the publisher is important metadata for anybody who's doing book publishing. But there's also this idea that a book may have been contributed to by an institution. So if I were to look for institutions, you'll see there's this little institutions list here. And I'm sorry, I just, I meant to, this is an optional field that can be used to display the institutions which created this resource. And it lists a bunch of colleges and universities. So the idea here is I've listed, let's see six colleges or universities that collaborated to make this resource. If that's been saved, this will be displayed as part of the book metadata in a couple of places. One is if I visit this book's homepage, you'll see down at the bottom on all this metadata we display about the book, titles, et cetera, it's gonna show you the institutions who contributed to it. You'll also see that when you go to, I think I have this set up, where did I put my catalog for this? I'll get demo catalog. So here you can also see the institutions will show up in your catalog field and they can be filtered by there. They'll also show up in the press books directory. So if you wanna just indicate that institutions collaborated in making a book, that can already be done in the book info field and it gets displayed in the metadata and other things. This is a little bit different. It's like the owning institution and it provides like backend management to see like which books belong or being developed and updated and maintained by a given institution, even if it's not in their specific book info thing for public display. Couple of fields where we were looking to add some information we weren't quite sure where we might be able to put things that didn't seem to fall within the categories. That's a notes field. And then the question arose about would we be able to just basically have it as a notes field that could appear under the book info but probably not within the metadata display fields? Yeah, so depends on the kind of information but there's a couple of fields that can be used for that kind of like notes and creation information. I'll show you a few of them and you can tell me whether this would kind of meet your needs or not. But in book info, sorry, it's gonna take me a second to pull this up. In book info, the first thing you'll have obviously the title and short title but there is the first field that might be of interest is what we call the short description and the long description. The short description can be anything that you want so I've written a short description here and if you visit this book you'll see the short description is displayed right here at the top of the books, the subtitles displayed here, here's where the short description goes. So some people use this space to say, this is a collaborative project created by so-and-so or this is an introductory level chemistry textbook. There's also a longer description field that gets displayed down near the bottom whereas the longer descriptions show up right here under the book information page, the book description. And this is a field where sometimes people put much, much more text, they put links, they put resources, they put other things. This is a more capacious field and either or both of these can be used for that kind of notes about the book or a description of what the book is. If it's information about the copyright or how the book is licensed, you can insert a custom copyright notice with whatever information that you like. So I just put fake in there but this is also a space that people sometimes put information about how they'd like to be attributed or what specific terms of use they want to associate with the book. I don't know if that's the kind of notes that you're looking for maybe or if there's something else that you're hoping to describe about a book. And if so, let me know. I think these were fields that we didn't necessarily want to be displaying as part of the public persona of the book but would be like I said, for the institutional use and things that would help us document it. So if it's stored within the book like we could keep a separate database of this but we kind of want to keep it all together if we can and to store it within the book but it would be an institutional notes field is kind of what we were thinking which could be flexible and we could use but wouldn't necessarily have to display in those public versions of the book. Okay, interesting. So what you're describing I guess is like internal metadata about a booklet. Yeah. Here's a status update for a project or... I don't think it's anything super private. It just wouldn't be of any interest to anybody else. I don't think but within the institution there is this information we would want to include within if we were able to. So we were just trying to MacGyver something out of the field that we had to figure out how we could do that. And I thought, well, bring it up and just ask. So that, I don't think that's a feature that exists right now. It would need to be... And my question is how would you envision yourself using it or accessing it? Would you want it to be displayed in a uniform consistent way for all books? Someone would input it but then how would you imagine seeing it or using it from where in the interface? Would you want to see it? Well, I think it could relate. Like one of the challenges that we're looking at is institutional turnover. And so if somebody maybe authored a book the copyright belongs to the institution. This is the example I'm making up on the spot but we might want to actually track who the original author was but maybe that's not necessarily something we would want to display in the current version of the book but we might want to keep that as part of the institutional record related to that book. So like I said, we could have a completely separate mechanism to try to do that but it might be nice to actually be able to keep it within the book. That's just an example off the top of my head. There are several other things that we've been thinking about that we might want to include in an institutional field that would be accessible but not a public field. Most like I said, because it's probably just of no interest to anybody except a few people within the institution relative to the history of the book. I see the value of having a notes field about a book that's visible for administrators but isn't displayed on public metadata. I think probably Donna, what we would need to do is I need to talk with you more about how to shape this into a feature idea and how to put it into our backlog. So conversation offline sometime, I think I can give you a link and you can book me and we can talk about it. And that's probably how we'd want to proceed on that but thanks for bringing that up. And then it's not a feature in restrooms now we need to be built but I can see a little bit of the shape of what you're talking about. Is there anything else? So the portion of the meeting now I guess is the community roundtable. This is a chance for you to share any news or updates or things that you've been working on that you think would be of interest to the larger group. So I just asked Alia from the University of Oregon to share a pretty cool feature that she's been working on developing there. Recently in press books we started providing more detailed information about page views and book file downloads for each book across certain time span periods. It's available in the network admin dashboard and it uses some of the Cocoa Analytics page view data and the individual book download data that we track. And Alia has whipped up something really cool in a visualization tool that they use at work. And I've asked her to share that with the group. All right, can everybody see that? Great, okay. So this is as like Steel said this uses Power BI which is a database tool that we use at U of O. And this is just this page uses mostly at the press books Cocoa Analytics and then the rest of the report and uses a lot of Google Analytics except for this map, that's all Google. And then I pretty much just have it set up so you can select any of the books on our network that are public and take a look at their got page views, visitors and downloads over here, download type and all of that is only from press books. I found Google does not do a good job with those download numbers for us. And then this is just a table displaying the same data. You have a lot of information about refers. I'm still trying to figure out what's most helpful to our instructors. I got a request last week about providing information about link clicks like what links are students using the most and what so trying to figure out like what's valuable and that instructor is also gonna do a survey to his students to get anecdotal feedback in addition to this analytics feedback. But yeah, we have this page on the most viewed chapters from all the books and yeah, well, if anyone is interested in doing a similar project, always happy to talk about this process. It's been really fun. And I've gotten to explore the Google Analytics API which was new to me. Yeah, so, but we really love the new press books analytics. It's made this possible and much better, I think. And I really love what you're showing. So thanks for doing that. I really kept everybody a little bit over time. I apologize for that. Thank you so much for coming out here in November. We will not be having a monthly product update in December because of the holidays. So enjoy the end of the year and we'll see you in 2024 with the brave new year and brave new everything. Appreciate all that you do and thanks for coming out. See you then.