 and welcome. This is Steel Wagstaff from Pressbooks. This is the July Pressbooks product update and what we wanted to talk over is a few things that we have been working on or have released recently that you might not have been aware of. We'll give you some updates on some of the big projects that we have going on and then it's there's gonna be time at the end for an open round table. So the first thing I want to start with is a few things that we've released lately that you may want to see or that you may want to be aware of. The first of them is we've improved the video resizer that we use for embedded videos in our textbooks. So by way of example, let me go to a test book here. So I'm gonna embed a video. So you can obviously put on its online and it will become an embedded video and you can also do this with text boxes and this is one of the ways that we worked on the resizing. So let's say I have a key takeaway box and I want to embed that same video. So when I paste it here it'll also be embedded and when I look at this chapter what we have is a JavaScript resizer that will make sure that the video will dynamically resize to fit inside of its container a bit more nicely. So I'll try to do this where I change the screen size and you're seeing that the video is resizing to always stay within inside the container and the resizer will now scale dynamically as the page gets bigger or smaller. That's a smallish change but if you've been trying to embed videos inside of text boxes you probably noticed that in the past and that should be fixed. The next kind minor thing that we did was we're now allowing what we're calling block elements inside of footnotes in PDFs. So previously when you created a footnote a footnote was a span element which couldn't by rule include block elements inside of it and in HTML block elements are things like paragraphs or things like lists or other kinds of complex content. So what we did was we changed the way that we're generating footnotes and now block elements will work. Here's an example of a chapter that has a bunch of end notes and here there's a fairly complex end note where there's a paragraph and then there's a logical a set of logical proofs. It's a list item and all of these are now contained in the single footnote. That was being displayed with end notes and I'll show you now an example of it being displayed footnote. Here's a larger footnote that has block elements in it. So in the PDF this will be displaying kind of as you're expecting it'll be a more complex footnote and it won't break the footnote anymore and we'll work in the PDFs. You should notice that working in your pressbooks networks if people had had that problem previously that's been fixed and that's an issue. The third thing that we did is only related to the LTI 1.1 provider tool but some of you are using the LTI tool in in your LMS for various kinds of things. So if your network has the LTI provider plugin what we've added is a new endpoint that will automatically create and provision a book upon the use of that. So to do this this is an example that I'll use with Moodle. So the LMS that I'm using here is Moodle. What I could do is I could click add an activity. I would choose external tool. You'd have something similar in the LMS that you're using and we're going to say I gotta move my screen but add here and then it's going to ask me for a URL. I'll call this making a fake new book and what I'll do is you would enter the URL of your network so in this case it's and then you type format LTI create book and this endpoint here will result in the creation of a new book with that activity and then subsequently users and other people can then just click the link and we'll view a book that was created through this link. You already could have already created a book and just brought the link in but some people wanted to be able to create a book from the LTI launch and this tool will allow you to do that. So when I click save and display because this book is being created it didn't already exist. It'll take a second here and then as this user it will show me logged in and have a new book created. So I just have a new book. The name of the book will be the name of the course and Moodle in my course was called new book test and the activity was called making a fake book so that's the name of my book in press books and if a student were to log into the course and click this link they would be logged into this book and they would be given whatever role they were supposed to be given for that book. So that's the new feature that's kind of an LTI provider feature for being able to create new books. Oh this is only for edu networks but those of you who are hosting pressbooks networks with us you'll notice if you were to go into the network admin and look at your network settings what we'll display is if we have a user name if they've entered a first and last name we'll display the network manager's name instead of just their username. Sometimes it's a bit easier because you might not know who like pf Jenkins is or whatever and then you're oh yeah that's micah Jenkins or whoever it is. So if we have a user's first and last name we will display it here in your list of current network managers. We just think that makes it a little bit more friendly and human readable. It's not a major change but that's smaller. I'm going to pause there and just ask if anyone has any questions or things that they wanted to see in greater detail. A quick question here. Yeah hi John. Hi so when you start ed going to create the book from the from the LMS what permission must you have on the in the pressbooks backend? You must still be a network admin? No so in order to create that book the person in the LMS has to have permission to create an external tool. So generally they would need to be a TA or an instructor in the LMS but if they if they create that end point by creating the activity then pressbooks will provision a new book and the person who who launched that link will be the administrator of the book because they will be the person who created the book and then anyone who they want to add to the book they could just add in the normal way or they would just be added via LTI LTI launch as in it as with every other LTI link. Did that answer that question John? Yes it does. Thank you. I have a question. Sure go ahead Anita. So is there an advantage to using the LTI to create a link in say like an LMS like Canvas because I was sort of thinking I would just like put anchors in the pressbooks and then use the link that way is there some advantage of using the LTI? Yes and no so the LTI there's a couple advantages of launching via LTI the first advantage of using LTI to load content is that it's going to produce a secure connection between the LMS and the pressbooks network and so for example if you have private content so a book that's not public or a chapter in the book that's not public the LTI launch will make sure that that content is displayed to that user and that the user is given a pressbooks account with a role that gives them the ability to read private content so it's helpful. Go ahead. So they can't just share the link in other words. If a book is public and is published to the web you can totally just share the link you don't need LTI really at all for that. LTI is generally helpful for showing private content or for making sure that accounts are provisioned in order to read content but can a second use case that we think is more valuable is if you have a graded pressbooks activity that's our new LTI tool if you have a graded pressbooks activity then the LTI link will ensure that we know who is taking the attempt and we know who to put the grade in the grade book for but if you're just trying to make sure that students can see a book you can just use a regular URL as you said the LTI launch is only helpful if you're trying to load content securely in the LMS or provision user accounts to see private content. Okay great no that's that's very helpful thank you. But if you're working an open and it's open book then the LTI is not adding a ton of value I would say. Right okay great. Okay the next thing that I want to show in the demo is a little bit of an update and on two of the bigger features that we've been working on the first is the pressbooks directory and so right now we have a staging site up and I will drop the link to this this is not the finished directory and it's not perfect and it's still in progress but if you were to visit staging.pressbooks.directory you would see a sample of what we're working on and what we're trying to build and I wanted to also say I really appreciate those of you who took time to give us initial UX feedback and suggestions for how we should improve this tool where we've been working on improving it. So between the last time and what you see now you're seeing some changes the first thing you'll notice when you land here is that you'll see the top how many books are included and how many networks we're indexing these numbers will increase over time but you'll now see that if you were to search for example I might search for the chemistry here I perform a search and you then see I'm seeing 33 of the 3000 books have the word chemistry in them in some way and I can then scroll down and I will see a book card which has the title of the book which would link to the live version of the book and then some metadata information about it an author a subject a word count storage size and a description as well as a cover image the language that's been declared for the book the copyright license here whether it has h5p activities and if so how many and if this book is based on another book or is an original book in terms of our metadata and so you can scroll down and you can see that i'm seeing 10 results at a time and then the tool will have some pagination where you can go and see additional results you can change the pagination and display more results per page if you like using this tool at the top the other thing that we allow you to do is in addition to just full text searching I can clear the search out and I can also use some of the filters on the side and these filters are still in progress but there's the include filter and there's an exclude filter so for example I might want only to see works that have an open license so let's exclude all of the all rights reserved books and you'll now see that there's an active filter that says not all rights reserved so I'm now seeing 1400 books that have open licenses and I could then say I only want to see books of a certain subject so I only want education social work and biology and you'll now see that those filters have been applied here at the top and I could remove one at a time where I could clear them all by clicking that clear button I can also filter based on word count so I only want to see books that have at least 5000 words and I turn that filter on and then I could also say I only want books that have at least five h5p activities and you'll notice again my results have been filtered I'm seeing 10 books now and all of these should meet these filter conditions so what we're hoping is that this tool will begin to help people find interesting openly licensed books out there that they might want to adopt adapt clone remix or do something useful with now the other thing to note is that for each of these individual books if I'd like to learn more about the book like here's a nice book from from a house states network if I click on the title of the book this will open a new tab and will show me the actual book on the live network and so I can see okay this book is in fact a ccbync book which means I can clone it and I can modify it and here's the url that I would need to use to clone a copy of that book to my network those are some of the things that we built into the director there's a lot more that we're still planning to do to refine its appearance and and make sure some of these features work a little bit better for users and that's the initial set of kind of UX refinements and improvements we made based on the first round of feedback the other big thing that we are working on you won't be able to use this feature quite yet but we'll be released pretty soon is I can show it in a demo network a lot of you have talked about wanting to make sure that individual authors can choose to opt out of the directory for their books if they like so I'm going to show you an example here what we what we're going to be adding is for each individual book there will be a setting under sharing and privacy where you can choose to exclude the book from the directory or not so by default public books will be in the directory but any individual author can say don't list this book in the directory and can turn that off and we're also working on some tools for network managers to be able to say if it's not in my catalog exclude it universally and we'll be communicating with network managers on our networks a little bit more about how that will work but it would be a global setting most likely at your network level I see in the chat a couple of questions I'm going to pause here and take those questions so the first question is can you clarify if the search is looking at a full text of each resource okay so what what we're looking at in the search is just the metadata so when you're searching in the pressbooks directory you're only searching the available metadata and that would include the title the subject the description field or any of the other metadata that we've pulled into the directory we are not searching the full text of books and don't have the capability to do that right now a still quick question Jim and you see um when would you say would be a good time for us to start sharing that directory out or do you have that on the roadmap like when you think would be a good time that's a great question I think there's no problem in letting people know that the staging site is there we just haven't published like the v1 of a public directory you're still going to find in that staging directory some features will be changing and they're like for example like the include exclude filters those aren't the final display values that we want to have and you'll see some test books and we haven't weeded out a bunch of false positives yet we will definitely have a bigger announcement when the public directory is ready and it will be a different URL it won't be staging that pressbooks that directory so I would say use your discretion for who you share it with and who you want people to use the staging directory just know that it's a beta tool that's not really publicly released yet so sure sure thanks I just didn't know if you had it on the roadmap like we're looking at you know january 2021 that will know um our our our internal goal is to have something finished by the end of this quarter to have a public release before the end of september perfect thank you but again we work on two-week increments so we can't promise too much ahead and I would add to that like that I know that I've looked at it and it's pulling in things that are kind of junk things out of our our you know like test books that we've created and like all kind of stuff so I know there's a lot of not a lot but there are some things from us that I wouldn't I mean I don't care if people see them but it's definitely not demonstrating the type of content that I would expect the pool to look like in the end exactly and that's something so as we start to build better um opt-in opt-out tools we also plan to communicate more with our network managers to to give them some tools and help make sure that everybody feels good about what's being listed in that directory before we have the public release so we haven't launched that communication effort yet but that's coming pretty soon from us steel steel I have one more question about the directory so I love that you guys have added the book privacy thing will that be rolled out with the directory or in advance of the directory I just want to know when I can give my authors a heads up it will definitely be rolled on in advance our plan is we're building it this sprint and it's going through final testing today and tomorrow I believe that it will pass testing and if it does it will be released on Wednesday in our production networks but I oh wow okay I we have not yet released it so I that's my hope we will let you know when it's released and we'll communicate with you about it but that the ability to opt-in and out is very close and we expect to release it soon perfect thank you um I also uh many of you are aware that we have been working on the pressbooks lti 1.3 update or upgrade which uses the newest standard of lti to connect learning management systems with the pressbook system and it also exchanges graded information I think we've demoed and shown that in past product updates but we made a couple small tweaks and feature improvements and we're gradually improving that one of the big changes that we made there was similar to what we're showing you with the directory I can show you in in the screen share but what it's giving people is both network level and granular control about where the grading functionality is available so for example if you had a network if you have a network that's using this feature and the plugin is activated what you'll see is at an individual book level a network manager can decide whether grade reporting configuration is available for a book or not so for example let's say you want to start off with this feature but you only want to try it out in two or three courses you want to do a small scale pilot you can choose which book or which books have the grade reporting functionality turned on if the setting is turned on to yes then you will see in that individual book when you view a chapter you'll see this little box here that lets you configure the grade report for that chapter if that setting is turned off so let me find a book where it's not turned on so it says no in this book when the user is editing their book so let's say ahead of the chapter there's no box here that lets you configure this chapter for grading because that setting hasn't been turned on at the book level you'll also see that if you wanted to make this globally available on your network and that's what you'd purchased and turned on you would be able to do that at the LCI settings enable grade reporting in all books and so you could toggle it globally rather than at the book level so that's one of the smaller changes that we've made but it just gives people more granular control about where grade reporting is used if you're planning to just purchase it for a small set of your users or if you wanted to roll around in pilots okay so then the last part of this meeting we always like to reserve as a roundtable for anyone who has news or information to share things that they're working on that they think would be of interest to the group open source development projects or just good news to share related to generally related to press books and the floor is yours if you'd like me to exclude it from the recording just let me know and I'll pause the recording I'm really excited about us adopting press books at Salt Lake Community College I've been a WordPress user for a while and we recently just published our first OER textbook in political sciences and tomorrow we're going to be publishing a humanities reader an OER humanities reader and I'm really excited about us building our our press books library right now I'm the only editor in open slcc and we're trying to build our OER library and I'm very excited about being able to use press books because of all the one because of all the features but also two because it gives us a standardization and security and you know that sort of thing and quality congratulations Anita that's a big deal and we're looking forward to many more OERs from SLCC so nice job thanks for sharing the good news if you don't unmute yourselves Lauren and she's still here Ariana someone's gonna have to share that news too I just saw something recently in social media that you probably want to announce yeah we just had an article published on our sort of case studies around our experiences with supporting OER authoring and publishing at our on institutions um I'm at University of Washington and Ariana is at University of Houston would you be willing would you be willing to drop a link in the chat yeah yeah and Ariana I don't know if you have anything helps to add or if there's specific things that would be helpful to share um yeah I would just say if you don't have access to the article we will soon be depositing an open access version of it in one of our institutional repositories so that's coming soon congratulations and thank you that I'm excited to read it I don't have access to it right now so I'm waiting for the open access IR but awesome I'll make sure to let people know and that's available cool thanks anyone else have news that they'd like to share or things they wanted to bring up I'd go um if I can uh yeah so you I'm gonna introduce yourself at the beginning but um I'm really really excited to announce that the use of crossbooks in Ontario has grown to a point where we need a whole other person to support uh the work and today to have Rama joining me uh on this this call and just could congratulate Rama for for joining the team at the campus Ontario and she's she's bringing a lot of expertise in public librarianship and publishing and working with technology and generally just being really excited about helping people solve their problems at uh and going above and beyond as you mentioned so um we we've just seen interest in this tool take off and um we we couldn't be more excited to sort of be able to add a person to our support team congratulations Rama and good luck thanks everyone thanks Lilian this is Christy from the University of Minnesota I just it's isn't like hugely exciting but um we we've done a lot of original content publishing with press press books up to this point in time but over the course of the last few months I've worked with two faculty members in two large enrollment biology classes to create kind of customized um conglomerations of existing open content and some library resources um in press books and they're going to be implementing those in the coming semesters and I just I'm excited about the like that we've finally gotten some uptake in terms of the use of existing open content um just because it it can happen more rapidly than the creation of entirely new content which often takes us a lot of time and I'm excited that it's going to be impacting a large number of students amazing yeah I think our situation at Wisconsin is kind of similar with we saw so much original creation which was time consuming and reinventing and we were wondering we were always hoping that we'd have greater uptake with adoption adaptions just because we could see more impact there and for whatever reason those we had fewer of those projects than Clint go ahead I've got something yeah I just wanted share an update on the the project that we have happening here in BC around press books and h5p so we have some OER grants out we have five grantees that are developing h5p interactions specifically within press books and to to to augment those press books textbooks with h5p activities and we've set up a support site i'm going to share this just in case other people might find this useful we're calling it the kitchen but this is a site that we have set up for our grantees for it where we're sharing resources and tips around things like how to develop really effective formative assessments using h5p within press books and so we've got some some webinars and some resources and some how-to's that we've been posting there so if anybody else has got people who are interested in in using h5p within press books you know happy to share these resources with with with everybody who might find them useful thanks Clint everybody loves a good kitchen so that's amazing playing off our our opening I think you tied in nicely nice thanks this is tons of great news I feel very excited I should have just started the meeting with this