Blog

New Fill in the Blank Functionality for ActiveTextbook

January 24, 2018

One of the most requested features for ActiveTextbook is the ability to fill in the blanks left in the original text. We are excited to announce that Evident Point is now working on adding this new overlay to ActiveTextbook! With the new fill in the blank overlay, your readers will be able to highlight the blank areas left in the original text, choose “Create Overlay” from the drop down context menu, and select the new “Fill the Blank” overlay as shown in the picture below.

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Evident Point and eThink Education partner to provide adaptive and active learning capabilities to Moodle and Totara

January 15, 2018

We are pleased to announce that Evident Point has partnered with eThink Education, a world-class eLearning solutions provider, to provide adaptive and active learning capabilities to Moodle and Totara users. This partnership  provides eThink clients with ActiveTextbook, an adaptive learning tool that enhances student learning, and can be seamlessly integrated within the Learning Management System (LMS). ActiveTextbook takes learners from reading to interacting by allowing Instructors to enrich course materials with videos, images, audio clips, texts, attachments, and interactive widgets, encouraging deeper engagement with learning resources. eThink clients can now take advantage of ActiveTextbook features such as:

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Datalogics releases READynamic 3.2 with SONY DRM

January 11, 2018

Datalogics, Evident Point’s distribution partner and the premier source for PDF, EdTech and eBook technologies, has released ActiveTextbook-based READynamic 3.2 – now with Sony DADC User Rights Management Solution (URMS) support for both PDF and EPUB documents. SONY’s Right Management System offers a powerful level of industry recognized security that will allow for full content protection. It offers flexible Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection to work with different business models and help businesses create the desired user experience.

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Readium 0.29 Has Been Released

January 11, 2018

Readium 0.29 has been released The Readium development community is pleased to announce the release of 0.29. This release was pushed to master and the Chrome store on 22 December 2017. This release is primarily some minor updates: Additional fixes and improvements to the Hypothes.is support in the Readium CloudReader Updating the Android support in the SDK to the latest releases for Android tooling and the NDK A number of minor bug fixes across the various modules The tag for this release is 0.29 on GitHub. 

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W3C Has Published Three First Public Working Drafts

January 5, 2018

The W3C Publishing Working Group has published three First Public Working Drafts (FPWD), and Evident Point is ensuring that ActiveTextbook is compliant with all three. According to W3C, the three drafts are as follows: Web Publications – A collection of information defining the structures of Web Publications in a way that user agents are able to provide user experiences that are well-suited to reading publications. These user experiences include features such as sequential navigation and offline reading. The Web Publications include the default reading order, a list of resources, and publication-wide metadata.

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ActiveTextbook Is Now IMS LTI Certified

December 15, 2017

We are pleased to announce that ActiveTextbook has now passed the IMS conformance testing for the LTI certification and is now guaranteed to meet IMS Global’s standards: https://www.imsglobal.org/compliance/atb

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ActiveTextbook on The Path of Becoming Fully Accessible

December 5, 2017

Currently, around 15-20% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability. This is the case while most websites and software products are not accessible, making it difficult or even impossible for many people to use. Web is an essential part of daily life for a lot of people and it is crucial to remove barriers that prevent interaction with or access to websites and software products. One example of accessibility is adding alternative texts to images (alt text). Adding alt texts to photos allows visually impaired users to get access to the image information using screen readers. There is even a business case here since in addition to accessibility, adding alternative texts will greatly help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as it provides better image descriptions, helping search engine crawlers to index an image properly.

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Readium 0.28 Has Been Released

November 10, 2017

We are pleased to announce the release of Readium 0.28. This new version of the EPUB reading system can be used in different browsers and embedded into browser apps. One of the main components of this release is the implementation of a plugin, which provides integration with the Hypothes.is framework of annotations and bookmarks. The integration will provide readers and authors the ability to

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Creating A Quiz In ActiveTextbook

November 10, 2017

With Active Textbook, quizzes can be made available right inside the book for students to interact with and test their understanding of the concepts as they are reading. The quiz feature is an interactive overlay (an overlay is an object added to books in ActiveTextbook) that is created in a book. Interactive questions can be created that will be shown after a Reader clicks on the overlay zone. Quizzes can be placed anywhere in the book. It is a great resource for engaging students and making sure they are following along.

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The Integration Project To Bring Open Source Annotation Support to EPUBs Has Been Completed

September 27, 2017

Evident Point, together with our esteemed partners, Hypothesis, NYU Press, Readium Foundation, and EPUBjs, is pleased to announce the successful completion of Hypothesis and Readium integration to bring open source annotation support to EPUBs through Readium. Readium is a free, open source, cross-platform reading system engine that provides the best way to read EPUB, the fastest-growing eBook format, and Hypothes.is is the leading online open platform for annotating the web. In this integration project, Evident Point has developed the ability for the Hypothes.is annotation framework to

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We Are Exhibiting At The World Conference On Online Learning (ICDE 2017)!

September 20, 2017

We are excited to announce that we are going to be exhibiting at the World Conference On Online Learning, the 27th edition of the International Council for Open and Distance Education   (ICDE) World Conference. The conference takes place at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto with the theme of Teaching in The Digital Age – Re-Thinking Teaching and Learning. We will be at the conference from October 16th to 19th. If you are attending this event, stop by our booth (#41) and find out how ActiveTextbook is changing the eLearning experience and supporting open and flexible learning.

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EPUB: Server-side pagination

September 11, 2017

EPUB file format has been widely adopted as a format for digital books. EPUB specification is very comprehensive, it defines: EPUB Container, XHTML files in a zip container. EPUB Package, a way to relate components of an EPUB to each other. This may include various metadata, index, table of contents and spine information. EPUB Canonical Fragment Identifier (CFI), a mechanism for describing a location within an EPUB. Media Overlays, which allow to synchronize audio tracks with text content in a book. and various other technical standards.  The latest spec is EPUB 3.1. There are two omissions however, namely searching and pagination. We will describe searching in a future article and tackle pagination today.

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Creating Overlays in ActiveTextbook

August 28, 2017

In this post we will be exploring media overlays and how to add them to your books. Overlays are interactive elements that can be added to the content; these interactive elements can be videos, images, text, attachments, quizzes, links, audio clips, and interactive widgets. There are two ways of adding overlays to books. The first method is to highlight the text you want to add an overlay to. After making your text selection, a context menu will appear. At this point you can click “Create Overlay.”

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Next-Generation Learning Management Systems (LMS)

August 14, 2017

According to the Horizon Report, 2017 Higher Education Edition, the next-generation Learning Management Systems (LMS) are virtual learning spaces that support personalization, meet universal design standards, play a large role in formative learning assessment, and are more flexible than traditional LMS. A market study done by Technavio, a leading global technology research and advisory company, suggests that the global next generation LMS market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of more than 26% during 2016-2020.

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ActiveTextbook with Docker Containers

August 8, 2017

I’d like to discuss a topic that’s not directly relevant to end users but is very important to businesses hosting and maintaining ActiveTextbook. Specifically, I’ll be talking about hosting and updating ActiveTextbook server software with Docker containers. Docker is a containerization technology that has taken off in the last few years. The original ground work was laid by Google, but popularized by Docker Inc in 2013. Containerization is a standard way to package server side applications. Packaging all applications in the same manner allows for a efficient workflows and numerous other benefits:

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Evident Point is Developing a Storefront for ActiveTextbook

August 3, 2017

We are pleased to announce that Evident Point is in the process of developing a storefront in ActiveTextbook, allowing customers to monetize their books through our platform. The storefront will be available as a fully white-labelled solution, and will implement the PayPal system to allow users a safe and reliable way to purchase eBooks. Our clients will be able to get a branded storefront with a responsive mobile-friendly design to sell their interactive eBooks online.

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