~ By Mirko Vucicevich

Hello everyone!

By this point in time you’ve likely heard of outline.uwaterloo.ca or personally used it to author or publish an outline. In fact, as of today most faculties have either started mandating the use of the software or strongly suggest using it!

As the developer of Outline this has been wonderful to see, and working with everybody on campus to refine the tool has been an absolute pleasure. We have, however, long passed the point where “one dude from Science” stopped making sense for overseeing the development and management of such a critical tool.

Ownership of the software has now moved to the AVPA's office, and we’ve been in the process of collaborating with IST’s developers to make the long-term development and support of the software more sustainable. We’ll be leveraging the FAST group to find a happy middle ground where the project can be owned and managed centrally while allowing faculty leadership to maintain the loudest voice in the continued evolution of the tool and surrounding processes.

In order to facilitate better long-term support between groups we needed to rewrite some of the project’s code. A lot of it, actually... And since we needed to rewrite so much of it anyways, we’ve tried to fix many of the issues people didn’t like in the old version, and added as many quality-of-life improvements as possible along the way!

Things we’ve changed

Author UI Overhaul

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The whole user interface has been rewritten. Hopefully for the better, but these things are subjective. We’ve carefully worked so that nobody will get lost in the new interface – things are, for the most part, where they were before (and where they aren’t we’ve hopefully put them somewhere more convenient)

Streamlined Author Workflow

Anybody familiar with Outline will know that authors only need to worry about 3 pages: The dashboard, the edit page, and the info/settings page.

Now there’s just 2 pages!

We’ve put all the settings for an outline (sharing, sections, etc) right at the top of the editing page:

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We’ve also inlined the “student busy-ness heatmap” right below the box for instructor information!

We’ve taken additional steps to make adding sections and importing previous outlines more intuitive, and will be leveraging some new capabilities in the future to add more helpful widgets for instructors.

Different Rich-Text Editor

I’m not going to say improved. It’s different. The reality is we had very little control over the old editor, which translated into problems we had no way of fixing.

To give us a little more control we built a new editor from various parts, and have attempted to configure it in such a way that can maximize the accessibility of the output while improving consistency and usability. There’s still work to be done here before we can call it perfect.

This is part of a longer-term effort to build a better rich-text editor for several tools on campus. We’re very happy to take feedback on this, as every fix we make to the editor will translate to improvements to many tools!

If you’re interested in playing with the new rich-text editor early or want to help us make it more user friendly and accessible, you can check out the documentation page for it and reach out! (Warning: this is the technical documentation!)

Better Boilerplate Tools

Some users may have noticed that there’s simply too many boilerplate options. We can’t fix that. We can make it easier to get the options you need, however!

For fields where there’s only a couple of obvious boilerplate options, we’ve collapsed things into a simple dropdown for quick selection:

While fields with lots of boilerplate options have a browser which lets you preview the options, search for content, and even get boilerplate from other departments if you’re teaching a cross-appointed course!

Re-styled Course Outlines

We had a lot of complaints about the old style, and I’ll admit I’m no artist. IST’s developers contributed a lot of effort toward improving and simplifying the course outline style to be more modern and appealing.

Also the font isn’t like 4x too thick anymore.

These styles will retroactively be applied to all previously published outlines as well, so everything look nicer after the update!

Local Copy Download

We also got a lot of flack for the PDF output Outline was providing. While we strongly recommend sending students to view their course outlines online (so it’s as up to date as possible!), we fully understand and respect the desire for keeping an offline copy.

We’ve added a button to “Download a Local Copy” which will save a fully self-contained and portable .html version of your outline. Unlike a PDF, this local copy is a perfect 1-to-1 duplicate of the online version, including all the styling, accessibility considerations, etc!

.html files can be opened on any device, be embedded into teams channels and LEARN shells, and won’t be going out of style anytime soon.

If you still need to physically print your outline we’ve added some additional features such as appending a list of URLs to the end of the document.

A Whole Bunch of Guts

Unfortunately, as things go with programming, the majority of the work we’ve done won’t actually be seen by the majority of users. We’ve done lots of internal work to make things run smoother, be more consistent, and also help administrative staff deal with department level management.

We have a strong foundation now for the campus community of developers to build upon, and the hard work put into this will definitely be felt over time.

Things to come soon after launch

Since developing Outline isn’t anybody’s full-time job, not everything on the mountain of todos is making into day-one of the launch (we tried, there’s just so much!) Below are some of the notable things we’ve promised people that are almost ready, and will hopefully be available before Spring Term or soon after!

French!

English and French are the official languages of Canada and we’ve got courses taught entirely en Français at UW – Outline now fully supports having a French version of the template, we just need to get the titles and table headers translated by some French-speaking staff.

Images!

For many years I have argued that images have no place in a course outline, and for many years I have been told I’m wrong. Well, we’ll be putting in image support! While we built Image support in the new editor, I’m not happy enough with the current implementation, alt-text, and resizing tools to put it into outline just yet, so we need to bake this just a little bit longer. If adding images to your outline is something you’re passionate about, please reach out if you’d like to help experiment with the image tool.

Boilerplate Tracking!

While our boilerplate tools are useful, it’s come to our attention that it’s not always obvious when it’s time to update boilerplate you’ve added to an outline – especially if you’re importing last terms' content.

We’re hoping to add some helpful tools which will indicate to authors when optional boilerplate’s gone stale.

Updates to “The Template”

There’s been more than just code going into this update. The AVPA elected a small group to investigate and refine the template we’ve been using in Outline to help instructors build better outlines.

This has involved investigating policy, past recommendations, and best practices from literature. Also a lot of after-hours and during-lunch meetings.

The team worked with many stakeholders to review the proposed changes, and those proposals are currently on their way to senate for approval.

Instructors will find a handful of new “blocks” when they start their outlines for Spring! Some of the most notable changes below:

New Required Blocks for Late Policy and Generative AI

These two new free-form blocks are being added to help cover common holes in course outlines that lead to student grievances. Most instructors already include their late policy in the provided boxes, so all they’ll need to do is cut and paste that text into the new box.

As for Generative AI – well it’s here, and a lot of people love using it. Every course and instructor is going to approach GenAI differently, and that needs to be addressed in every course outline. While the university supplied some optional boilerplate text for the old template, only ~50% of courses (in Outline) remembered to include any of this boilerplate – now that it’s a mandatory block we hope instructors will be able to more consistently communicate to students their course rules on this subject.

New Tables for Ed-Tech and Other Materials

We previously included a single table for “Textbooks and Materials”. This has been split into three optional sections: Readings, Technology, and Other Materials.

Each of these sections can be left blank to omit them from the published document, but instructors are encouraged to list out any technology (even LEARN!) for accessibility purposes. With Bill 166 now in place, we’ve also provided a space for including cost in all of these tables.

A Mandatory Statement Re: No Costs

One of the requirements of Bill 166 is to determine and report on how many of our course outlines are in compliance. With course outlines published in the Outline tool we can easily count how many course outlines do have costs listed, but it’s harder to determine, at scale, which course outlines legitimately don’t have costs (as sometimes instructors simply forget to put them in.)

Authors will now need to select one of two statements to be stamped onto the outline, stating whether the course does or does not have additional costs associated with it.

Outro

And that’s it! I may have missed a couple things, but I’m sure our users will discover them along the way and continue to help us smooth out any bumps.

I hope that the University of Waterloo’s faculty and staff will continue to support this initiative as we transition to a new development model and more centralized management strategy. While I won’t be driving anymore, I’ll still be in the vehicle pointing out red lights and speed bumps and generally annoying whoever’s at the steering wheel for the foreseeable future.

Thank you everyone for the opportunity to work on such an exciting (and hopefully useful) project

You can get support for Outline by emailing OutlineSupport@uwaterloo.ca