 Everybody, I'm SteelWagstaff. Welcome to the PressBooks Monthly Product Update. It is January of 2024. The first thing that I want to share has to do with some large scale rebuilding refactoring work that we've been doing with the PressBooks LTI provider. And in rebuilding PressBooks LTI, we've kind of rebuilt it from the ground up. And one of the big focuses has been just making the LTI plugin easier to configure for network administrators and LMS admins, and then easier to use by instructors. And what I want to start is by showing a new feature called dynamic registration and how that works to simplify the initial registration of the PressBooks network as a tool with your LMS as a platform. The dynamic registration is supported by three of the four major LMSs. So it works with Moodle, it works with D2L, and it works with Blackboard. Canvas doesn't support dynamic registration right now, but it does support the use of a JSON URL, which I think we showed in the last meeting, but if people have questions about that, I can show that. What I want to show today is how you would be able to register your PressBooks network as a LTI tool with Moodle. And I'll use Moodle as an example because it's an open source LMS that I have easy access to. This would be the step that you would take if you were a Moodle LMS administrator. You'd come in to click Site Administration. You'd then click Plugins. In Moodle, it's called an external tool, and there's a Manage Tools link. Here, Moodle gives you a nice little interface that lets you add your tool URL. So in this case, I know the URL for my network. So it's LTIDev, PressBooks.network. And then the endpoint is Format LTI Registration. At this point, I'm going to make this a little bit bigger. You just click Add LTI Advantage. And what this is doing is we're communicating now with the PressBooks endpoint and saying, hey, there is an LMS out there that would like to register your network as a tool in its environment. And so we provide a little interface that says you're about to register a PressBooks network as a new LTI tool. Click the Register button to confirm. Click the Register button I confirm. And then it says you've successfully registered the PressBooks development network for LTI as a new LTI tool. To use the tool registration, a network manager has to activate the press platform in PressBooks. So I'm going to close this, and you'll see here in Moodle, I've got a new pending tool registration. If I want, I can go ahead and add, I'm going to just add a couple of settings right now that will enable deep linking, which I'll show later. I'm going to show it in the activity chooser. I'm going to say that it supports deep linking, and I'm going to go ahead and just add that as my content selection URL. So those were the steps that were needed for this to be configured on the Moodle side. I'll now show you in PressBooks, you'll have a big list of all of the LTI platforms. When a new platform is registered, you'll see here's a brand new platform that's just been registered with my PressBooks network. It included all of the information that Moodle needed to give me, and you can see by default, it's not active. So anyone can use the dynamic registration, but the PressBooks network administrator needs to look at this and say, is this actually someone I want to give access to my PressBooks network via LTI? In this case, I just did it so that I know I do want to add it. So the only step I need to take is click active and click save changes. So on this point here, I've now activated this Moodle instance to have an LTI connection to my PressBooks network via that entering the URL in Moodle and activating on the PressBooks side. The other thing that I can do in Moodle is I didn't activate it, it's pending, so I'm going to go ahead and say activate. This LTI configuration is now complete. And what's nice about that is it took me, I don't know, two or three minutes while I was talking to show you the whole configuration of that tool. A similar process exists for Blackboard and for D2L, and a comparable but slightly different process exists for Canvas. So we're hopeful that what this will do is it just will make it a lot easier for your LMS administrators to get PressBooks configured and for you as a network manager to see and decide who you want to approve. We think this would be especially valuable if you're in a situation where you have many institutions all trying to connect via LMS to your PressBooks network like your consortia, or if you have multiple LMSs, or if you've used an LMS where it's been hard to coordinate with your LMS administrator for whatever reason, the dynamic registration should make that process a lot faster and smoother. All right, so now I want to show from the instructor point of view. Historically, one of the ways that you can bring content in from PressBooks to your LMS was through the use of common cartridges, and that's still supported. So if I were to go to, we've simplified this process a little bit so that there's only one option and it's always easy to use, but if you click Export or a given book, you would have the ability to make a common cartridge with LTI links. What this will do is it will give you a zip file with all of the individual links to specific content in your book that you can then bring in an import into your course and it will turn them into LTI links. That's a process that requires someone to go into PressBooks to make an export to come into the LMS to do the import and then it's all done. And it saves a lot of time rather than doing them one by one, but there is a smoother and an even easier process for instructors that will now be supported. It's called deep linking. And so I'll show you in Moodle what this looks like. I have an empty course in Moodle. I've turned editing on for the course and here I'm gonna just click Add an Activity or Resource. From this list of choices, you'll see there's a new PressBooks tool. This was the LTI tool that I registered earlier. If I select this tool and then pick Select Content in Moodle, it will bring up a modal that shows me all of the PressBooks content on that network that I have author editor or administrator access to. And so there's a book here and I could say, let's add these two chapters from this book and bring them in to Moodle. So I select the content. It's saying, okay, it's gonna add some new external tools. Yep, that's what I wanna do. And here I click Save and return to course. And now I've got two new LTI links that have just been brought into my course via deep linking. I were to launch and open this. This is what it would look like in Moodle. There'd be a new PressBooks chapter here that's just the live version of this chapter is linked and will load just a second here in Moodle. So here's that chapter that's just been loaded within the Moodle interface. A very, very similar process exists for, actually identical process exists for Canvas, for Blackboard and for D2L. And the deep linking, the feature is really just gonna give you, or an instructor, a simple selector that they have that lets them pick the content that they wanna bring into the LTI. So that you don't have to bother with manually importing chapters or even doing the common cartridge import. So those are the new features. We just today went through the certification suite and our finalizing that with one edtech. And so the new LTI plugin is, we're going through the final stages of testing and release and we will be upgrading or migrating all of you or all of our PressBooks clients to use the new LTI plugin. The idea would be that it would be a no effort migration or upgrade for you. If you've already configured things, the configuration will work in exactly the same way. If you've already brought in LTI links, they'll work in exactly the same way. The steps that I just shown you would be things that you could use or do if you haven't already configured LTI or if you haven't already brought LTI links into a given course or a book. So that's what's happening on the LTI front and I'll pause there and take any questions. Okay, so Cheryl asked, can deep linking work for a book on another PressBooks network? Well, yes and no. In order to set up deep linking, you have to have an LTI configuration between your LMS and that PressBooks network. So in theory, yes. If let's say an instructor wanted to deep link to a book, let's say there was an instructor at the University of Oregon that wanted to link to a book on your network at the University of Arizona, Cheryl. If you as the University of Arizona network manager wanted your whole network to be connected to Oregon's LMS, then you and Oregon could work at a situation where they registered your PressBooks network as an LTI tool, they approved it. And you said, yeah, that's fine with me if Oregon's LMS is connected to our PressBooks instance. In that case, they could use the selector. I think what's most commonly gonna be the case though is one institution's LMS will want to connect to their PressBooks network. And if there was a book from another network that you wanted to deep link, you would probably then just clone or copy the book to your network and then make the link from your network. Did that answer your question or was that more confusing? No, it does, thank you. Yeah, I thought about the cloning option, but then that would count against our number of books in the new tiered pricing system. So we're trying to avoid cloning now. I see. Yeah, so the other question for Kathy is can a book be integrated into more than one university's LMS? Definitely. Provided that you've approved the LTI integration on both sides on the PressBooks side and on the LMS side. Okay, so like as Sharon and I, if my faculty were using one of her books on her platform and her faculty were as well, she and I could work out a thing where we could each have a faculty member as administrator and it's not gonna freak out either LMS or the book to have it deep linked in two different institutions. No, yeah, so for example, on our test network, we have the same PressBooks network connected to Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, and we could have it connected to seven different Canvas instances at seven different institutions. Like that's pretty common for a consortial situation where you've got a book that's shared by 20 campuses and each one of those campuses has an LTI connection and that same book will link just fine as long as you've approved the LTI connection between what's called the tool and the platform. The tool in this case is your PressBooks network and the platform is any LMS. So there's no limit on the number of platforms or LMSs that can be registered with your tool. The biggest constraint is just working out the permissions between your LMS administrator and your PressBooks network administrator to allow those LTI connections to exist. Any other questions about LTI or how that works or what it would do? If deep link thing isn't essential to you, you obviously can continue doing the old common cartridge with web links and you don't need to have an LTI connection for that to work or if the book is public Cheryl, you can simply just put a link to the public book in your course and it launches as an external link rather than an LTI link and there's no limitation on that. You don't, the major benefit of LTI is it loads securely in the LMS and it handles user authentication and registration. So it's especially useful if you have private content because then the user's authenticated and given permission to view it. With public content, it's mainly just a convenience of loading in the iframe, but LTI has other advantages to down the road I think. All right, so that was the thing I wanted to share with LTI. The second major change that we made has to do with glossary terms and what we wanted to do was we were looking at glossary terms and we're looking at the way that they displayed and we realized there were some barriers to accessibility for how glossary terms were working and so we revamped the glossary term selector and the glossary term display for improved accessibility and so here I'll show you, we built a new pattern and have implemented it. I'm gonna give you an example book. In press books, I think most people know how to create glossary terms but if you've made a glossary term and linked it, you'll see a glossary term will usually be indicated with a dashed line underneath it. So now I'm gonna move to my browser and I'm using the keyboard and I'm navigating and you can see keyboard navigation, I'm targeting or highlighting the various glossary terms. Just using entirely my keyboard, I'm gonna click enter and I'm gonna open the glossary, sorry. And what you'll see, I've got too much capital in here. Let me select a glossary term and then you'll notice as I enter and select it, you'll see a modal pop up that includes the term and it will read out the description of the term and then it has a little box that lets me shift focus. I can either click the X or I can press escape. When I do that, it closes the modal and it returns focus back to the term that was just selected. So it's now fully navigable by keyboards and by screen readers and the users are able to open terms, focus is shifted there, it's clearly amounts to the screen reader and then when you close the term, your focus is returned back to the text where the term was selected. So it's just changed to the pattern used for glossary terms but it was an issue that was reported to us by users in Washington that it was hard for users of assistive technology, particularly of screen readers to track where they were and to see what was happening when glossary terms were opened. So we just changed the pattern that's being used and you can now see it's all keyboard navigable and follows better accessibility practices with glossary terms. Any questions for me about glossary terms, how they're used and any of the accessibility features that we just added? There were a couple of their minor bug fixes and accessibility things that had been released in the last couple of months. I won't go through them in great detail but if anybody has questions about bugs or issues that they've noticed, we can discuss those sort of towards the end. One of the big things we've been talking to people about has been how to help better support multi-institution installations of press books or situations where many institutions are sharing a single press book network. This happens most frequently with consortia or university systems. Ecampus Ontario is a very large provincial organization that has many different campuses sharing a single press book installation and they approach to saying, we'd like better tools for managing and getting visibility into institutional use. And one of the particular challenges they had was in press books, there's really just one powerful admin role. It's the network administrator. They have a couple of network administrators but they have so many institutions using the network that they wanted to be able to delegate those responsibilities. They really wanted to have an institutional manager role where that person would be able to administer books and users but only the books and users that belonged to a given institution. And that simply wasn't possible as press books was initially built. And so we've begun designing and thinking about how we can add support for multi-institutional indicating which institution a book and a user belongs to, how to manage those things and how to create a new institutional manager role. We're at the design phase and we've been working with all of our consocial press books clients to work on the designs. And I'm gonna hand it over to Michelle to kind of show some of the prototypes and the wireframes that we've built before we actually build the features. We have some prototypes and wireframes to show and we're at the gathering feedback stage of this process. So Michelle, if you'd jump us in, jump in and take it away. Thank you. All right. So we've been working on a prototype as Dale said for this. And as such, the main part is that we've developed this sort of new institutions subheading. And so underneath that, we will have the institution list. You can add your institutions and then assign the users and books that you previously had to those institutions to better organize all of it. On this page, you can see, this is what it looks like when you have filled out an institution. So you have their name, the email domains that are associated with it, the institutional managers that would also be in charge of their institution and what the book and user limits are that you would prescribe to each of them. Along with this, in order to get one of these entries in, you would have to add it. So you can do it by clicking the add new button or just coming into the subnavigation to add an institution. So here it gives you a few tips about adding that in, including their name, those domains, institutional managers, they would have to show up already as existing users to come up and then book limit and user limits will be defined basically by press books in concert. So they're not accessible by the network managers but they are changeable, of course. And once you have added an institution, they would show up here. The other parts are assigning users. So all of the users would show up. But first when they show up, they'll show up as unassigned and so you would need to go through the list, select them either probably by just looking at the email domains and then you can set the institution and then that way they can all be assigned under a particular institution. And that goes similarly for books as well. So the book administrators would show up and then you are able to add the institution just by selecting one of the items and then of course setting your institution to the one that it would be assigned to. And that is what all of the new features are that we were adding. There are additional sort of knock on effects. So you will have different views whether you are an institutional manager or a network manager. So this is what the network manager would see it's the same as it always shows up. But in this instance, there will also be now an institution tab as well as an institution column so that you can see how everything is applied across the entire site. Same goes with users. Now you can see exactly where they are and you're able to filter that through these lists. The stats page will also include an institution column as well. And if you are one of these institutional managers you have like a limited subset of actions that you can take but you can now see all of your books and all of your users. Steel, I'll pass it to you. Is there anything else you'd like to mention or any questions? Yeah, first I think just any questions. Thanks for that. Really helpful walk through it. No questions about this in the chat so far. So this is big work that we're engaged in right now. It will be probably our, actually it will be definitely our primary obsession between now and the end of March when we have scheduled to deliver this work. You can see the wireframes are fairly well advanced. We're beginning development work on this right now and our main focus will be shipping these features incrementally and making sure that the relevant institutions that have consortial interest see and understand it can use these features. The only other thing that I wanted to explain is that how the institutional manager role is conceived. Essentially if Michelle if you could open up that Figma screen again and show the institutional manager dashboard, I just wanna pause and set a couple of things here. So the first thing that if you are a network manager, so many of you are network managers, you'll see a typical dashboard and if we could show the network manager dashboard first, the network manager, when they visit their dashboard you can see there's that block at the top that shows you the homepage. It tells you information about the whole network. It lets you explore the stats page for the entire network and then there's a series of actions that you can take. On the left hand side of the menu, you'll see books, users, institution, appearance, pages, et cetera. These are all things that network managers can do for the entire network. They can update the homepage and they can administer the network. The major difference for an institutional manager is that they're more constrained. There's a bunch of things that only network managers should be able to do. So the idea for the institutional manager is they will see a block that just tells them about usage for their institution. So rather than the network has 1,000 books and 2,000 users, they'll say, my institution has 250 books and 103 users. When they click explore stats, there will be a custom stats page that shows them books, users, page views, downloads, all those things only for the books and users tagged or that belong to their institution. So it would be a subset of the entire network. And then in terms of what they can see, they will be able to see just a book list and a user list and their book list and user list rather than being the 252 books overall, it will show them here are the 29 books that are owned by or belong to your institution. It's similar to the role of a network manager but just constrained to be just stuff that's relevant to them. So it's kind of like a little sub-account, I guess you would describe it as within the network. Otherwise, their capabilities and their functionality will be very similar to what a network manager can do just within a smaller domain. So institutional level admins, for example, Cathy, let's say there is a book and the authors are having problems and they need somebody to go in and help them turn on a plug-in or activate something. The institutional manager, if that book is assigned to the institution, can do everything that you can do as a network manager. They can edit the book, they can help add users, they can delete users, they can administer the book. You can as well as a network manager but you could also say institutional manager, you handle this one because they're a user of your institution and that's a book that belongs to your institution all years. They can also see that Google, yes, they can see and configure Google Analytics. They can also see and configure the Cocoa Analytics or the user stats or book stats that are available at the book or the institutional level. So that's what's coming and we're really excited about that. I think Mary's probably excited most of all and we hope to share some more updates and then by the end of February to show you working software and production. That's related to that. Yeah, go ahead. I have a question totally unrelated to anything you talked about. I was just looking at press books and I guess this is a bit of a troubleshooting question because maybe folks here have run across this. If you look at the statistics for a book and you'll have like really good usage and then there'll be one day where it's zero and then it moves on to have pretty good usage. Is anyone come across that and is it really just as simple as no one looked at at that date? When you say usage, can you just, are you talking about like the number of page views collected in Cocoa Analytics? Yeah, that's right, yeah. Okay, that's a good question. I would say probably what's happening is that there's like what's supposed to be a cron job that's regularly collecting those and updating those every day. If there's a zero, it probably means that the cron job didn't run as it was supposed to run on that day and then it maybe ran the next day and the next day was twice as high. If you're seeing that or you're seeing weird collection issues like that, that's a good idea to just email premium support and show us, here's the book, here's the weird thing we're seeing and that's something that we can investigate because we wanna make sure that the numbers are more accurate at the level of the day. And if you're getting a zero for an otherwise active book, it probably means that something failed with the collection and we should look into that on our infrastructure level. We'll do, yeah, that's what happened. You can see the next data, the numbers double, so it's like probably missed. It somehow missed something missed there and I don't know what would have happened but we can definitely investigate that if we don't work on it. Great, thank you so much. Yeah, thanks, Kevin. Is there anything that anyone wanted to ask me about or that wanted to ask about either bugs that you've experienced or features that you're interested or problems that you've been encountering that you wanted to bring to our attention? I do. Sure, thanks, Liz. So I've been talking to Thomas, actually. He's been helping me sort through an analytics question and that is that as we're using the LTI maybe in our LMS, we're curious how to look at statistics on how much use is going through the LMS. How are they? And so I think we're, I'm just wondering if there is an easier way than going book by book and looking at the refers list if that makes sense. Yeah, so Liz, this is something that we've just been talking about as we've been rebuilding the outside program. Can you tell me what kind of usage statistics are you most interested in knowing and how would you want them presented? That's a really good question. I think what we would be interested in knowing is, or initially what we would be interested in knowing is aggregate, are we seeing a lot of usage through the LMS? Yeah. But I think we would also like to see how it breaks down by the book and by the course. Totally. But to begin with, we wouldn't need that initially. Like I think we would just need the aggregate data to begin with. Yeah, the things that I'm imagining people would want to know would be, so let's say you have a generic LTI connection established and you'd probably want to know at first like how many courses or contexts has it been used in? So let's say it's 157 courses have at least one LTI link to press books. And then probably I think we'd want to know how many students or users accessed or maybe how many times they launched each one of those links. Those are some of the basic counting stats that I think we'll provide for the new plugin or that we're imagining. We do want to talk with you and other people that are using LTI to be like, what information do you want visibility into? And then also we want to know because we need to understand how LTI is being used so that we can make sure that we're doing the right thing for the people who are using heavily and also figure out if people have it activated but aren't using it, is there a reason why and what can we do to help them use it more effectively? So- Can you see that being a report that we would request from press books or would that be something that we would be able to do on our end? I don't know. What depends on the LMS you're using and I'm not sure what, I don't know the answer in terms of. Are you, I think you're at Canvas school. Canvas, yes. Canvas may already have information about LTI tool integrations as I don't know and I just don't know enough about what else. So this is learning that I'd like to do. From our side, we know information about LTI links because whenever they're made, we respond to them by launching the link. We could certainly say, okay, just keep track of these numbers and that's the direction that we'd be trending towards. We'd probably put that in the dashboard for you. Okay. There's still some research questions I think we need to answer. I agree that that's valuable information to have and we want to satisfy that need for you. So thank you for bringing that up. Oh, I'm very excited that you're looking into it. Thank you. Yeah. Hopefully that will be something that's, if not part of the initial release, part of something that we add very soon after the LTI upgrade so that we can visibility into that. Anybody else have something they wanted to bring up or ask about? I have a question sort of for the group, maybe. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about, we've been doing a lot of analytics stuff recently and I've been thinking about adding a privacy policy to our press book site and if other people have privacy policies they really like or have thought about the best ways to talk to their users and faculty and students about privacy on press books. So I just sort of wanted to bring that up as a topic if this is a good space for that. This is Kathy Oakley of Estate. We have a framework. We can't call it policy because it's not law and it's specific to our teaching and learning team. It's written by Christina Kauffman but I'll grab it and drop it in the chat for you. Hi, that may also be a good question. It's asking the community forum of other network managers. I know I've seen some stuff in the past. I think UC Berkeley has one in place and I think maybe Lorena University of Washington might have done some work on this. I don't remember who else has, but it's been a while. Before I jump into the round table, I also wanna mention there are three upcoming events that will be of interest potentially for you and your users. We have these regular training webinars that getting started with press books webinar and the advanced press books publishing. These are often for end users who want to back up the people who wanna create their first books. They're getting started with press books webinars on February 5th from three to four Eastern time. The advanced press books publishing one will be on February 14th from two to three Eastern time. We also have a really special webinar that's kind of a one-off that's in a new series and this one's called Mapping Your OER Journey and our marketing team did a lot of really good work to make this happen. Orita, is this something you'd like to say anything about or would you like me to introduce it and talk about the topic? Sorry, I just showed a link about the webinar and feel free to share more information about that. Okay, great. So it's gonna be on February 7th from noon to one Eastern time and it's called Mapping Your OER Journey. So if you've been following our blog or finding Confidence Season, Julie Curtis recently published like a OER maturity model after a bunch of conversations with lots of you talking about like where people are in their maturity level with open educational publishing. And so we put together a panel of some really interesting people from our community. So Jonathan Lashley from the state of Idaho, many of you know Jonathan from his work at lots of different places. Ariana Santiago from the University of Houston and then Abby Elder from Iowa State. And they're all gonna be talking about charting progress, navigating challenges and then building and demonstrating impact for your publishing program. I think this would be a real interest for almost everybody who I know that's doing open publishing and especially those of you that are using press books as your platform. So if you haven't registered now, please do. It's a free webinar. And if you know of other people who are either just getting started with open publishing or are thinking about developing a program and they wanna just do some conceptual work before they dive in, this would be a really great panel or topic. And so we'd encourage you to register and attend and see you there, hopefully. That's all that I wanted to share on the webinar front and upcoming events. I'd love to open up the time. I'll pause the recording and say, this is your time. It's the community roundtable. Anything that you've been working on that you've been doing or that you'd like to share that you're proud of or that you want others to know about. Thanks everybody for coming and for your contributions. I really appreciate all that you do for open publishing and to support press for your institutions. We will see you again next month in February. Bye for now.