PreTeXt.Plus for Course Coordination

[Savanna Gee]

Hello!

My name is Savanna, and I'm a calculus course coordinator at the University of California, Riverside. To comply with accessibility requirements, I'm transitioning all course materials to PreTeXt. More specifically, I'm using PreTeXt.Plus. 

I started creating a "book" because I thought it would be easiest to share a single link with instructors that contained all the course materials (syllabus, notes, sample exams, worksheets, activities, etc.). I don't have much so far, just this very basic start of an outline: 

https://pub.pretext.plus/o/1134b1d7-07d4-401d-b7fe-e27f08630e56/website/document.html

I'm wondering:

(1) Can instructors make their own copy of this "book" so they can customize it to their liking before sharing it with their students?

(2) Is there a way to share specific sections of the "book" with students? We don't want students to have access to everything at the beginning of the quarter, and for the sake of posting things on Canvas, sometimes you just want one section of the "book" (for example, a single worksheet). But, I couldn't find a way to share the link to specific sections within the "book." 

(3) Related to Question (2), for the sake of sharing course materials for course coordination, would a "book" be the format you recommend? Or should I create separate projects for separate things? 

Thank you so much for your time and help!

-Savanna

[Joseph DiMuro]

Hi Savanna. PreTeXt has a "course" format, which is designed to allow instructors to bundle different kinds of course materials into one package, or to create them as separate pieces, as needed. I think that would be a better choice than the "book" format. I've dabbled with the "course" format, but I'm using PreTeXt software on my computer. I don't know if it's yet possible to do it on PreTeXt.Plus.

Then again, this could be a good reason for you to install PreTeXt... :-)

-Joseph

[Oscar Levin]

Hi Savannah,

I think "book" is the correct type of document for this (article could also work, but I like thinking in terms of chapters for main divisions and sections for subdivisions).  The course template that regular pretext has is secretly a book too (we have just hid it well :)).  So I think you are on the right track with what you have. 

I'm planning on coordinating Calculus this Fall using PreTeXt.plus myself.  There are only three sections (me and two graduate students teaching one each), so what I'm planning on doing is having a common syllabus with different build versions for each section.  We will all collaborate on the document, but only edit our own "components" for the customizations for our section (like instructor name and student hours, etc).  I don't know if this would work for more than a small handful of instructors though.

I think what you will probably want for sharing is to get your base course set the way you want and then let each instructor create a copy of it.  That means that they won't get updates after copying it.  It wouldn't be hard for instructors to go back to your copy and actually copy/paste new content when they need it though.

As for sharing just parts of the course "book" with students, you have a few options:

1. If you build the entire book, and set the build settings so you have one-page-per-section, then you can embed just the page of that section in your LMS.  As far as students know, there is no other page shared with them; they never see the entire book, only the embedded pages. Technically they could find the whole thing if they inspect the source of the embedded code, so I wouldn't hide exam solutions this way, but for suggesting which parts to look at when, I think this is very effective.

2. PreTeXt has the notion of a "version" of a book.  You specify which components you want included, and components that don't match are dropped.  Note that PreTeXt.Plus does not yet have this feature in the build settings, but it is the very next thing I plan to add (later this week).

3. Like you said, you could have multiple projects.  I'm planning on having a student-facing project and a separate assessments project (holding the quizzes and exams) which I will never share with my students, for example.  I know other instructors do this with a separate syllabus.  I think it is perfectly reasonable to have separate projects for roughly each chapter of the sample course you started with.  The disadvantage of this is you cannot easily cross-reference things in different parts then.

Does that help?  I'd love to hear about what you settle on.  We can implement features for PreTeXt plus that would make it more useful to your use case.

Cheers,

Oscar.

[Savanna Gee]

Hi, Oscar!

Thank you for your reply!

As for sharing just parts of the course "book" with students, you have a few options:

1. If you build the entire book, and set the build settings so you have one-page-per-section, then you can embed just the page of that section in your LMS.  As far as students know, there is no other page shared with them; they never see the entire book, only the embedded pages. Technically they could find the whole thing if they inspect the source of the embedded code, so I wouldn't hide exam solutions this way, but for suggesting which parts to look at when, I think this is very effective.

Can this be done in PreTeXt.Plus?

 

2. PreTeXt has the notion of a "version" of a book.  You specify which components you want included, and components that don't match are dropped.  Note that PreTeXt.Plus does not yet have this feature in the build settings, but it is the very next thing I plan to add (later this week).

This seems like a good solution! Perhaps I will try this once this feature gets added to PreTeXt.Plus. 

In this case, it sounds like the whole book would still have to be shared, is that right? For example, if there is a chapter called "Worksheets" within the book, does each worksheet come with an HTML share link that can be posted on Canvas (as separate assignments, one for each worksheet), or would instructors have to share the whole book and release the worksheets as they're assigned by making them specified components to be included in the book? (I hope that question makes sense!)

I know the PDF print version of worksheets/handouts can be downloaded and posted on Canvas that way, but are those accessible to screen readers? My understanding is that I need the HTML code to comply with digital accessibility requirements. 

3. Like you said, you could have multiple projects.  I'm planning on having a student-facing project and a separate assessments project (holding the quizzes and exams) which I will never share with my students, for example.  I know other instructors do this with a separate syllabus.  I think it is perfectly reasonable to have separate projects for roughly each chapter of the sample course you started with.  The disadvantage of this is you cannot easily cross-reference things in different parts then.

Multiple projects sounds like a lot to manage, because I'm working with five different courses**, so I'm hoping there's a way to have one project for each course (five projects total, or possibly 10 projects if anything related to assessments should be a separate project). 

**At my institution, we have two single-variable calculus sequences, one for physical science majors and another for life science majors. Furthermore, we're on the quarter system. The single-variable calculus sequence for physical science majors is three quarters, and the sequence for life science majors is two quarters. Hence, five total courses. 

-----------------

Thank you again for all your time and help!

PS - Thank you also to Joseph for your response! I'm reluctant to use "regular" PreTeXt because I'm afraid of the giant learning curve involved and the need to download/install things. PreTeXt.Plus seems much more manageable. But, I'll invest the time in "regular" PreTeXt if it's what needs to be done. 

Savanna Gee

Academic Coordinator

Department of Mathematics

University of California, Riverside

Email savan...@ucr.edu

Text or call (951) 827 - 0671

Visit Skye Hall 218

Hybrid Schedule (Summer 2026)

Skye 218 - Tuesday, Thursday

Remote - Monday, Wednesday, Friday

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[Oscar Levin]

The Canvas embed definitely works for books written on PreTeXt plus.  You can also set a build option to say which division level gets its own page.  For example, if "worksheets" was a chapter, each worksheet would be a section, and you can make that have its own html page.  Then just that page would be embedded, even though the entire book would be built and available at your (secret) website.

The versions thing could be useful if you wanted to only release a section during certain dates.  Or if you wanted to have a different version for each instructor.  You could create a different output for each instructor and they would then get their own site from which to do the embedding.

For printable things, my recommendation is to not use the PDF output, but rather to use the html with a worksheet or handout division so students can print directly from the accessible html.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pretext-support/CAKRJMtDgCqeFsefRWMi%2Bs%2BOGFj0w72b-FvAUX4wF8cOqWiu6RA%40mail.gmail.com.