Good morning, Siddh can you we could pray first then we get into this morning's class and yeah good morning, good morning, Divya just like to request someone to pray be someone who hasn't prayed recently on this call to lead in prayer please yes Rosalind please go ahead yes Rosalind thank you Lord Jesus for this wonderful day thank you Lord for this session that we are going to have we come before you Lord for the God as we receive the ministry of your word we ask you to enlighten our eyes of understanding give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation to understand your word as it will be taught this morning Lord I also pray and ask you to anoint our dear pastor as she delivers your word every word that comes out of our mouth but may it bring a breakthrough in our lives. Father God we thank you and we bless you and Jesus mighty name we pray amen amen thank you thank you Rosalind God bless thank you for leading in prayer I just wanted to say that since the last date for the online students your assignment submission was sometime ago you've completed it so you know I I will hopefully soon so that that is something I want to tell the online students but the e-learning students your set of assignments are completely different and your marks are generated almost immediately as soon as you complete your assignments so it's like two different sets of assignments okay so e-learning two more assignments are due and online students one assignment is due and you know both the corrected your marks will be given online students and also your next assignment will be posted shortly so that is just a piece of information there Rosalind you have another question or is that raised hand from begin from that earlier okay okay fine so let's continue we've been studying about fasting and we saw you know what are how we can fast and what are the benefits of fasting so some brief introduction and last session now today let's continue we've been talking about fasting today we will try to answer how to fast okay so that that is something we'll touch on and if we have sufficient time then why to fast you know we'll we'll look at that as well so one of the reasons we saw many benefits of fasting earlier but I just want to kind of touch on the benefits of fasting before we get into how to fast one is that you know we are obeying Jesus remember Jesus said that his disciples when he is gone the bridegroom is gone the disciples will fast so this is an act of obedience unto the Lord so that is a reason why we fast and in the book of Joel you know we find that at least three times there is a call for a fast there is a call for a fast and the call for the fast sort of precedes the promise of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit so when we fast when we pray we talked about personal benefits right we said that we will have a greater focus intensity you know we will hear from God and be strengthened and all of those things but in addition that we are being obedient to God and we can also expect an outpouring of the Holy Spirit you know especially when we fast together as a community or a group of people and these are all you know points enough to encourage us to motivate us to fast even though fasting can be somewhat challenging for many of us all the benefits they outweigh the difficulty of going through the fast okay so now let's attach on a very important passage in the Bible that addresses this spiritual act of fasting it is Isaiah 58 you can just quickly turn to Isaiah 58 if you have a Bible open in front of you or those of us who are using our computers just go to that passage as a 58 and be ready because we're going to look at that entire the beginning of the passage today okay all right so remember we talked about you know the different kinds of fast one can undertake but at the same time we said that a fast is about our devotion to God our fast is about our consecration to God our fast is about our obedience to God so it's not the type of food or the duration of time you know it's unfortunately you know people take pride in the type of fast okay I fasted I did an absolute fast because it shows your capacity for self-control so it's something that you know you can brag about to others oh I fasted three days absolute fast or you know I didn't eat anything for 40 days and it it is something we can use to impress others okay but what is the actual motivation of that fast it is to please God so Isaiah 58 is a passage that talks about the kind of fast which the Lord accepts for people or even for us personally individually we can be impressed with any kind of fast that we do but how does it matter if the Lord is not impressed with it so we want to talk about we'll call it the chosen fast okay the chosen fast because it's all about the Lord choosing our fast or the Lord being happy about our fast so that's what we're going to discuss God has to choose our fast and God has to be pleased with our fast so what kind of a fast so the question is what how what kind of preparation is required for the fast so we will look at it in these categories one is the preparation for the fast so defining the motivation and the attitudes the right attitudes for a chosen fast or something that God approves of and then you know we will move on to why we fast you know even in the last class these questions came up why if when we are seeking God you know if you're asking for direction is it okay to fast so why are we fasting that is the second question we will answer so the purpose of the fast and then we will move on to touching on the promises I just told us that the book of Joel that promises the outpouring of the Holy Spirit when God's people engage in fasting so that is a promise you can hold on to it we can expect God to send an outpouring of the Holy Spirit so similarly there are other promises that God has for those who will fast and pray so let us first go ahead and read through the entire passage as I look at the chapter in front of me excuse me it has 14 14 verses so how about we take two verses each to read so just go ahead like if you haven't read it if someone else is ready to you want to read it then you know you go next or we can go by the order of our names here if someone is not reading it then you don't worry like if there's a long pause then the next person can read it okay so that way we can save time so can we do that can we all read two two verses each yes okay so how many ever folks maybe seven people can read it um yeah so uh abu becker would you please begin do you have the chapter in open in front of you Isaiah 58 verses one and two okay if someone is unable you can also put it on the chat and say I'm not able to read or something okay okay in a in a moment please we are going according to the alphabetical order okay just hold on just hold on okay I think abu becker is not able to read Anita are you able to read verses one and two yes yes yeah please um Isaiah chapter 58 verse one cry aloud spell not lift up your voice like a trumpet tell my people their transgression and the house of house of Jacob their sin yet they seek me daily and delight to know my rules as a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the or or in forsake the ordinance of their God they ask of me the ordinance of justice they take delight in approaching God okay thank you thank you Anita that's really helpful so verse three and four would be aradhana are you able to read if not you can just put it on the chat in case it's too noisy around you okay I'm assuming she's not able to blessing would you please be able to read okay she's not that's okay that's fine aradhana thank you for that message a blessing are you able to read verse three and four okay I'm assuming she's not Divya could you please take up three and four and then Elisha can read five and six why have we fasted they say and you have not seen why have we afflicted our souls and you have take and you take no notice in fact in the day of your fast you find pleasure and exploit all your laborers indeed you fast for strikes and debate and to strike with the fist of wickedness you will not fast as you do this day to make your voice heard on high amen thank you yeah Elisha you can go next okay five and six versus five and six Elisha you're on you're muted okay maybe he's having a network issue when he's back we'll see all right let's continue we were at five and six so whoever's next here jeffina yes yeah go ahead I guess eight was five and six you humble us help by going through the motions of penance bowing your heads like we eat spending in the well you dress in burlap and cover yourself with ashes is this what you call fasting you really think this will please the lord now this is the kind of fasting I want read those who are wrongly implicit write in the burdens of those who work for you it appears to go free and remove the chains that mine yes amen thank you thank you jeffina yeah we will go with the next person that would be okay Elisha is back Elisha are you able to read now jeffina at five and six you can do seven and eight okay no worries the next person uh liya okay we'll just go with okay like I was saying he can't hear Elisha I think the others are able to hear I don't know why uh you're not able to hear you're muted would you like to unmute okay he's having an issue for sure okay linden uh linden are you able to read the next two verses I know this is taking a lot of time but it's okay let's hear all as many voices as possible today yeah yes linden uh you can read seven and eight no yeah yeah one second is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter when you see the naked to clothe them and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood it will break forth like the dawn and your healing will quickly appear then your righteousness will go before you and the glory of the lord will be your rear god okay thank you thank you linden uh thank you for reading we will have the next person read um lubega are you able to read nine and ten okay yes okay so what we'll do is lubega can read i say um lubega can read as a 58 versus nine and 10 and then uh elasha can read 11 and same chapter as a 58 11 and 12 verses yeah thanks sivya yes lubega please go ahead unmute yourself you can read as a chapter 58 verse nine then you shall call and the lord will answer and you shall cry and he will say here i am if you take away the yoke from your middist the point the pointing of the finger and the speaking of the speaking wickedness if you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul then your light shall down in the darkness and your darkness shall be as unknown day okay thank you thank you lubega yeah amen amen uh elasha you can go next 11 and 12 okay as a chapter 58 verses 11 and 12 and the lord will guide your view continually and satisfy your desire in course places and make your bones strong and you shall be like a water garden like a spring of water whose waters do not fail restore and your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt you shall rise up the foundations of many generations you shall record the repair of the bridge the restorer of streets to draw in amen amen thank you thank you so much uh elasha okay uh nickle sin yes please last two verses there 13 and 14 as i have 58 verse 13 if you turn away your foot from the sabbath from doing your pleasure on my holy day and call the sabbath of delight the holy day of the lord honorable and should honor him not doing your own ways nor finding your own pleasure nor speaking your own words then you shall delight yourself and the lord and i will cause you to ride on high hills of the earth and feed you with the heritage of jacob your father the mouth of the lord has spoken okay wonderful thank you thank you so much uh nickle sin so we have uh gone through the entire chapter uh of isaiah 58 today and we've seen here that god has an expectation the people um that asia has prophesied to where they fasting where they committing themselves to the lord yes but god was asking them for a chosen fast okay what is a chosen fast chosen fast is nothing but an acceptable fast a pleasing past okay something that has been asked for by the lord so we've seen in the passage you know how god says oh you've done this and that but you know what i want you to do certain other things so when we fail to do the fast the way god wants us to do it then it doesn't get accepted okay remember in the old testament we we have this um uh you know when when the the sacrifice is presented it's consumed by the fire and that's a symbol of god's acceptance if it is not accepted by god our sacrifice is of no use so that is the reason we are studying how to bring an acceptable or in other words a chosen fast unto the lord so we saw how you know god begins uh speaking to these people in the first two um verses here it's it's like god it's like letting the people know they tell my people their transgression and the house of jacob their sins and yet these people seem to be uh traditionally doing the right thing okay which is to let's let's say in this case fasting so they knew okay i must skip some meals i must remain hungry and that is uh something as an act of worship unto the lord so they were doing it not that they were not doing it but still god says you let my people know what is wrong with them okay uh so god says this is this is you know it just doesn't equate i i'll read the first two verses for us cry aloud spare not lift up your voice like a trumpet tell my people their transgression and the house of jacob their sins yet they seek me daily so there are issues okay uh there is a sin issue and yet people are continuing to keep the practices yet they seek me daily and they like to know my ways as a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their god they ask of me the ordinances of justice they take delight in approaching god so the uh the actions that the people need to have they're continuing with it as if nothing is wrong but god has seen through their activities and he's saying that you know there are issues there are uh sins there are problems that have to be addressed and only then can this fast be an acceptable fast so let's continue what else what else is god telling them we'll go to the verses three and four over here he says why have we fasted they ask and you have not seen why have we afflicted our souls and you take no notice so it's as if the people are questioning they're saying you told us to fast we fasted why are you not accepting our fast then no god uh goes on in fact in the day of your fast you find pleasure and exploit all your laborers indeed you fast for strife and debate and to strike with the fist of wickedness you will not fast as you do this day to make your voice heard on high so god is addressing not the activity in itself no maybe they skip their meals they put on sack cloth as was their practice of humbling themselves those days so they did all that but what god is saying is that you know he was looking at the way they were treating the people who were working for them so he's saying that the people are being oppressed the workers are being oppressed on your fast days and that was not at all impressive to god so it it is something like you know where he says in fact in the day of your fast you find pleasure and exploit all your laborers so you can just imagine you know the way Jesus addressed the Pharisees and you know the the so the so-called teachers of the law now maybe on the day of the fast they could have skipped the meals and because they are so they are feeling weak they're not eating so they must have doubled up the work for the people who are helping them okay let's say even in an office setting now let's just put it this way I go to office okay and I have people working for me now maybe on a particular day I say today I'm fasting so if I'm generally working eight hours I tell them I can't work two hours at least you know you have to give me a compensation because today I'm fasting so then who does that extra two hours of work I put it on somebody so it looks like the people who are fasting they were practicing this discipline they were actually exploiting others they were not doing it in the right way okay and that was not pleasing to god god noticed all these things he said oh yeah just for the activity sake you are fasting but you know you are it's about your own interest because you don't want you know you don't you want to make that profit anyhow so you're dumping all that work on your workers so in other words you know the people who are working for us if they are not treated properly that is something that affects the acceptance of our sacrifice unto the lord you know can you imagine god is pointing to our relationship with the people who work for us okay and he's saying if we are oppressing them on and especially on our fast days if we are oppressing them and we still want to make a profit so we double up their workload it is not pleasing to god and you also see here he says for your own pleasure or the intention is not so much okay god I'm humbling myself you know I want to seek you but it is more of yeah I should get this I should get it's more like their own pleasure our own pleasure then that kind of a fast is not pleasing to god so when we are discussing about what kind of fast is an acceptable or a chosen fast god is really touching on the attitudes he's touching on attitudes he's touching on relationships so let's see we look at what is being told in this in the first few verses and then we'll try to conclude you know what are the areas that were addressed so we saw he's talking about you know our self-interest which is not pleasing to him he's talking about us oppressing others and that is not pleasing to him then moving on okay let's look at verse three and four yeah four also yeah he says in view fast for strife and debate verse four and to strike with the fist of wickedness you will not fast as you do this day to make your voice heard on high so it simply says strife and debate in our relationships okay are we are we the kind who bring up quarrels and you know complaints and just make things very unpleasant so if that is the case again you know having our relationships in that condition and still doing a fast and think that god is happy with it when we are not willing to rectify our relationships and here very specifically it talks about our relationship mainly with the people who work for us if that is bad then our fast will not be acceptable so it's funny isn't it we feel that okay god would address yeah you should not you should not eat food you should not drink water make sure that it not you're fasting for 12 hours he's not really addressing though that that area of fasting it's more about heart attitude it's more about lifestyle okay and when we have the right attitude and the right lifestyle what we are understanding here is it makes our fast acceptable unto the lord okay so these are the things that matter to god and and we are beginning to see that okay let's continue we do verse five six and seven here what does it say verse five he says is it a fast that i have chosen you know after you've oppressed all your workers and you still want to make a profit you doubled up work on them so that you can be comfortable because you're fasting you're weak okay then he's asking the question is it a fast that i have chosen a day for a man to afflict his soul is it to bow down his head like a bull rush and to speak out spread out sackcloth and ashes would you call this a fast and an acceptable day to the lord and outwardly humbling ourselves that's not enough is what god is pointing to verse six and seven so god is saying okay you've done it like this now let me tell you how i want it then he's saying is this not the fast that i have chosen to lose the bonds of wickedness to undo the heavy burdens to let the oppressed go free and that you break every yoke is it not to share your bread with the hungry and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out when you see the naked that you cover him and not hide yourself from your own flesh wow all of this is addressing heart attitude actions of righteousness okay and a chosen fast is really a well-rounded fast beyond the activity it is a true worship through our life to god now that's what god is expecting so he said right now the way you all are doing it by oppressing the the workers that's not correct so how what is correct the chosen fast he says here lose the bonds of wickedness okay that simply you know it let me read it in another version for a clearer understanding for us so it says in the message to break the chains of injustice so when we observe some injustice that is going on you know we have some contribution in breaking that so that is god's expectation from us so what else does he say he says to undo the heavy burdens in the message version let's look at it you know the message just to understand it in a simpler way we are reading it so what does undo the heavy burdens mean get rid of exploitation in the workplace again you know our relationship with those who serve us are we being proud and you know just trusting things on people god doesn't like that attitude okay moving on to let the oppressed go free again coming to the message version it simply says free the oppressed you know if we have bound people in some way put loads on them and bound them then we must be careful enough because in those days we know they had a slavery system right they were oppressing people very directly and god never liked that on one hand these religious people they're oppressing the weak on the other hand they're fasting and they're so proud about it and they're saying god we did it for you you know didn't we didn't we fast the correct way you know we ate the right foods and god is saying I'm not impressed if you want to bring me a chosen fast you address the wrong things that are taking place you know through your life so he says you must lose the bonds of wickedness or break the chains of injustice then you must get rid of exploitation in the workplace and then he's saying that you must free the oppressed so when we see you know people who are bound we bring freedom to them okay then later on it says to share your bread with the hungry so that's quite simple to understand to just have a heart of compassion where we are willing to give we're willing to bless others okay we're willing to share whatever resources we have been blessed with okay so that kind of an attitude god expects and he says bring to your house the poor who are cast out so again you know you could take it in the little sense where we we help those who are in need and who do not have the resources so bring home inviting homeless poor people blessing them in some way right doing these these these acts of mercy these are things that will bless god's heart so god is inviting his people to have a real walk of righteousness to have a heart of justice to have a heart of compassion to have a heart of giving okay to have a heart of mercy these things are addressing the attitude the motivation okay the lifestyle of a believer let's move on we're told you know when you see the naked that you cover him honor a heart of honor start to pull down people when you see the naked means yes one is those who don't have clothes no we we cloth them or give to the needs of the people but on the other hand you know maybe in in a more symbolic sense you know people are in shame for whatever reason we don't make it worse for them but we are there to help you know we are there to be bring that honor upon their lives then it says do not hide yourself from your own flesh you know in the new testament we we see that you know god says that on the one hand we are told like you know if you don't leave your your family your father your mother and come then you're not worthy of the gospel but on the other hand as you read the instructions that the apostles wrote to the church we see you know somebody who does not care for his own family is worse than an unbeliever so we have to look at it in context god is not saying abandon your family that's not what he's saying you know he's saying the attitude that we must have for the kingdom is we prioritize the kingdom that's what jesus meant when he said that you know if you don't leave your father and mother and then come to me so prioritize the kingdom that's just the meaning of it because in other passages we are told that we must take care of our family now again we are told here that if we abandon our own flesh or family members who are in need and we say no i'm busy you know i'm busy with the kingdom of god don't ask me anything don't i cannot help you god sees all these things and he doesn't like it so he says do not hide yourself from your own flesh meaning and in the new testament we see whatever good is possible by you you do it don't withhold it so we are supposed to have that you know that beautiful beautiful heart towards our family so whatever is due okay remember even the Pharisees they said why should i help my father and mother you know that that korban thing i will give that money to the temple but jesus never liked it so whatever is our due responsibility towards our family we need to do that so that's what we are being told you do not hide yourself from your own flesh or be available in other words in simpler words be available to your own family is uh is that a question i can hear someone is unmuted okay no worries yeah that's by mistake okay let's continue so you see here there are all these matters addressing one's attitude and one's you know life and not just the act of fasting and god has made it so clear in isaac 58 so if i want to fast well i have to work deep within my own life to bring an acceptable or a chosen fast to the lord and god is also telling us how to do it do you do you see that in all these verses what we were addressing relationships relationship uh with the workers relationship with people we don't know and who are in need relationship with those whom we find oppressed relationship with our own family members when our relationships are not right our fast will not be effective okay so that is the point now let's go further we will skip some verses here and we will continue with verses nine and ten let's see what these verses have to tell us okay okay no we have yeah we are going to skip verse eight here we will do nine and ten it says then you shall call and the lord will answer you shall cry and he will say here i am if you again what should you do he's telling us if you take away the yoke from your midst the pointing of the finger and speaking wicked wickedness if you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul then your light shall shine in the darkness and your darkness shall be as the noonday so some blessings also got included in in these verses that we read but there are pointers there are indicators it says take away the yoke from your midst okay in other words again if you read up the message version it translates as get rid of unfair practices you know we can be christians but we will not be walking in the righteousness of God we might have some wrong practices in our workplace and we are okay with it right but God sees these things and as the people of of Isaiah's time they were being told to check their wrong practices i'm sure this applies to us in our um day and age today so we are more in the corporate business and we are more in you know uh technology and things like that but even there there can be unfair practices whatever counts as an unfair practice God is saying come on get rid of it okay get rid of it i want you to be fair i want you to be just i want you to be righteous so we address our life uh problems in life then moving on so stop pointing the finger or uh pointing the finger is um you know like contempt or putting down or blaming another person so you can say that and you can also say take responsibility we take responsibility for our own lives so God is calling us to to become more responsible and not to you know put down others or blame others for the things that are going on and then it says stop speaking wickedness what is wickedness uh the message uh version you know it's a paraphrase version it's not the most accurate of course uh but it paraphrases it says quit gossiping about others since so wickedness can involve all kinds of words that we speak you know how sad isn't it like if i boast about my fasting yeah i have been fasting for five years but when you know me and you know my uh you know life you might get scared of me say oh that person uh she will gossip she will take the story from here until there and you know put people down it doesn't add up it doesn't match up because i'm trying to impress everyone with the fact that i'm fasting but what am i doing with my lips i am speaking wickedness or in this case gossip and that is not the chosen fast for god so god is saying stop speaking wickedness okay put an end to every evil word the gnp version of the bible it says put an end to every evil word it could be anything it could be anything gossip it could be you know slander could be different things stop that and then it says extend your soul to the hungry again you know the way we saw attitude of compassion attitude of mercy attitude of generosity right now we are seeing generosity to the hungry you know as believers sometimes uh i mean let me be honest you know life just gets so busy there are so many needs you know so many uh important things for us to check off our list in the middle of your schedule when you hear oh somebody is in need or you must there's a there's an opportunity for you to be generous sometimes we say later weekend i'll see now i'm very busy you know but god is saying you know what i really want you to awaken to these needs around you when you see a need don't close your eyes and behave as if you haven't seen it but respond respond to the person who's naked the person who's hungry to the person who's poor the person who's homeless so we are living our lifestyle consists of that compassion mercy generosity and of course righteousness you know wrong things injustice unfair things we stand up against those matters you know jesus said right we are the light we are salt and light so we have to stand up for what is right and then there was another portion there which said that satisfy this afflicted soul again you know somebody who is down somebody who's out maybe a friend calls you and they're just so depressed they need only a few minutes of our time and we say call me later i'm too busy right now you know we don't have time to minister to people in need but god says look if you want to have a chosen fast i want to see these attitudes in you and of course god is not saying that he doesn't understand our schedule and all we can be practical but we can still accommodate the concerns and the needs around us now one more thing one more instruction is there for a chosen fast and this is all the way we have to skip to verse 13 in the passage i'll quickly touch on that and we are just in time to to wrap up so verse 13 it says if you turn away your foot from the Sabbath from doing your pleasure on my holy day and call the Sabbath the delight the holy day of the lord honorable and shall honor him not doing your own ways nor finding your own pleasure now speaking your own words so this is another you know prerequisite for a chosen fast what is god saying god is saying i want you to honor the Sabbath now some of us will have this contention and say in the new testament it says you know observing days all of that uh it's it's not uh you know necessary that on this particular day you must celebrate the Sabbath but what is the essence of what is being said because Jesus healed on the Sabbath you remember the Pharisees they made a big deal out of it oh this man he healed a blind person on the Sabbath that became the issue not that the blind person got healed so then Jesus spoke rebukeingly to these people and he said look what is more important that you know a man he's able to save his people save the the donkey if your donkey falls in the pit will you not help on the Sabbath so basically when Jesus did his healings he justified it and he said the Sabbath is not greater right than the son of man so the point is not the day the point is the honor of our time given to the Lord okay so basically we honor God we honor him with our time with our worship okay you could say since Sabbath is mentioned that weekly worship yeah fine you know you honor the Lord with that you honor the Lord with your resources you honor the Lord with your talents with the opportunities with everything basically the honor that we bring to the Lord so you see it's more about attitudes it's more about walking a righteous path it's more about caring for the people in need right it's more about exercising self-control it's more about honoring God and that is what makes a fast chosen fast okay not just as simple as quit eating and yes it's done so it's not as simple as that so I'll stop with that we will in the next class we will touch a little bit more on you know the purpose of the fast we will look at that and hopefully you know we can also begin talking about the blessings of the fast okay so here in the comments Robert Siddkino is saying like gossip kitty party aunties okay God God doesn't like it so I take offense to that why only aunties Siddkino why can't it be others okay just kidding but yeah gossip whoever it is it's not acceptable unto the Lord so we have only one more minute left but I'm sure we can extend by a couple of minutes any thoughts any additional points you want to add questions Divya Divya is also saying yeah that gossip is not good whether it's men or women yeah sure Divya any any so we've seen you know how God is addressing deeper matters wow it really it really awakens you right to take a good hard look at your own life your own the first time I read from Isaiah 58 you know it really made me think I had to like take an inventory okay how are my relationships how am I treating people you know so it really really made me think to this day to this day it makes me think what's going on in my life so I just encourage you we go back look at the passage think about your own life evaluate and see okay God you know what are all the areas help me you know how can I correct this how can I correct that so God will help us yeah we are saying so basically God looks at the heart right mom yeah God looks at the heart not just our actions yes so wow there's so much to learn about the right way of fasting okay uh yeah so if there are no more questions we can wrap it up with the word of prayer all right let's go ahead and pray then uh would like to request Lubega would would you be able to pray okay you're muted shall we yes yes please thank you father in heaven we thank you for today's lecture we thank you for the gift of life that that you've given to us lord we also thank you for all my colleagues who are taking up this class with me here lord we also thank our dear pastor who is trying to inculcate some skills knowledge and values of God into us so that we can have that it can have a positive impact on our lives dear lord so lord we know that we are not here by accident but because of your because of your own choice and because of your own grace and mercy so please lord as we're taking a weekend off we also pray that this echoes in our lives as we continue to pray and we try our level best to meet on the next Thursday or next Friday in the same lecture lord we do pray and believe that everything is going to come to pass in the name of the Father the Son the Holy Spirit and I say amen amen amen thank you thank you Lebega blessed by that and have a wonderful weekend all of you and let's honor the lord with our worship okay a special time of worship during the weekend and please think about whatever we have studied and I believe that everything that we learn will help us grow in the Lord so take care bye for now God bless you abundantly see you yes thank you so much thank you


Hi, everyone. Welcome to the November Pressbooks Monthly Product Update. I'm still waxed down to the product owner, and I want to give people an update for what we've been working on and what we've been learning over the last month. A really big focus for us over the last month has been what we're calling the Pressbooks Results Pilot. In that pilot, we have been inviting a whole bunch of instructors to use our LTI tool with embedded H5P activities, and to produce graded score reports, and start to visualize some of the details of what students are doing as they conduct those activities. And we have really learned a lot through the course of the pilot. Some of the things we learned have been really interesting and really exciting, and some of the things have been really hard and frustrating and difficult, and part of the results pilot has been encountering some failure points and some points that we need to adjust and improve before we proceed further with the pilot. So I will kind of try to summarize some of the big things that we've learned and what we're going to do about them. One of the big things that we learned or we encountered was when we built the LTI plug-in initially, we were using a library provided by IMS Global or One EdTech. And unfortunately, we've encountered a bunch of limitations or problems with that library, and it's not been, I don't think, maintained or updated to the standards that our developers wanted as they were using it. And it's been a source of frustration or concern for our development team. And so what they proposed and what we've encountered some kind of intractable problems with the library, and so our team decided that we should refactor or rebuild the entire LTI core plug-in using a different, better, more supportable PHP library. And so it's a pretty massive undertaking, but it's meant essentially rebuilding the whole architecture of the underlying LTI plug-in with a different library. And that has consumed a big portion of the team's energy for the last month, and will probably consume a big chunk of their energy for the next month. But the positive thing I have to share is that progress on that is going really well. We have a migration planner path. So if you have already activated or are using the core LTI features, meaning you've set up an LTI consumer with your network and your CI links or LTI launches, we have a migration plan when the new plug-ins released, it will just be seamless and smooth and we'll be coordinating that with you in the coming months. If you're using the advanced grade passback and grading features, it will be a little bit more complicated and we'll need to have a deeper discussion with you, but we have a pretty good handle on people that have been doing the results pilot. Some positive, exciting things I guess to share about the refactor. As we do the rebuilt plug-in and we're using a different library, we will be supporting something that's called a dynamic registration. And if you use D2L Brightspace, Moodle or Blackboard or Sakai as your LMS, dynamic registration means that registering press books as an LTI tool is really like one or two steps. You provide a URL and the tool and the platform exchange all the information they need to be able to have a secure connection. And then as a press books LTI administrator, you just go into your list of LTI tools and you decide whether you wanna activate or approve the tool that the platform that's just been registered. That's gonna be a game changer and make it a lot simpler and easier to register LTI tools. The kind of unfortunate news is if you are at Canvas School, Canvas doesn't yet support dynamic registration and so you can't use dynamic registration, but what we have added is in Canvas, they do support you adding a URL endpoint that has much of the configuration information done there. So it will make the platform registration tool a lot faster. You still have to do manual entry in the press books platform, but we think it will cut in half the time and reduce the number of manual entry errors by 90% or something like that for people who are registering the platform in first time. So if you haven't yet connected LTI and wanna do registration, the new plugin will make that much easier, much faster and smoother for people. And I'll try to demonstrate that I think at our next monthly product update. I'm guessing it'll probably be in January because of the holidays, but we'll have something soon and I'll show you that flow and we'll produce videos and documentation and all of that. The other thing that we're working on that will be part of the new LTI plugin will be a revised and simplified version of the common cartridge export and import routine. What this is, is it's a method that allows you to decide which of the chapters or parts of your book that you'd like to have as LTI links and then to bring them smoothly or safely into your LMS. So currently in our current plugin, when we were building this feature initially, we thought that all of the LMS providers would support the same version of common cartridge. And in sad experience, we found that they don't. Moodle supports one version, Blackboard D12 support another and Canvas supports a third even though they're pretty similar. And so we ended up making three different flavors of common cartridge export that were basically identical but different for each LMS. And then if you were supporting one LMS at your school, you had to select this option and it just got a little bit too complicated. And so what we've decided to do is really simplify that and make a single common cartridge export format that will work for all LMSs which reduces the level of complexity. So like no matter what LMS you use, they'll be the same flavor of common cartridge export and it'll work in the same way. All right, first what I'll show is I have a book here in press books that's using the new LTI plugin tool that we have. And what you'll see here is under other formats, there'll be a common cartridge LTI links option. There won't be separate ones for Moodle, D12, Canvas or Brightway. So it'll just be a single option and it will produce a standard common cartridge file when you click this option and click export. This is what's called an IMS CC format file. It's an IMS common cartridge. You download it locally to your computer and then from the course that you wanna bring it into I'll just use this test course and let me go ahead and empty it out. I'm gonna reset the course. The process then looks like this. You come to import course content. You provide the file that you want to use and then you say you can select all content or just specific content. In this case, I'll do all content and we'll say import. Canvas will go through the import process. It will bring that content in to your course and then you'll see these are newly created LTI links that came from this book. So if I went to this book and I would show you, you would see in this book, there is an introduction and two chapters, the introduction and both chapters. I have LTI links now created in press books. What this means is that I or a student were to launch this. I'll go ahead and make sure I published this course and just show you the student view real fast. So I published the course and I'm now in student view. If a student were to launch this link, what they would see would be they still appear to be in the LMS. They're experiencing from the LMS and this is a secure LTI launch that will load that press books content, the live version of that in their LMS as soon as the screen catches up with me. So you can see, okay, I'm still in the course. I can do other things from the course, but here is that press books chapter that's been loaded and launched in my LMS. And that will work uniformly with whatever LMS you're using. It will use both public and private content and we have a bunch of other features that will be coming and that will be available when the new plugin is refactored. One of those is something called support for deep linking. Deep linking is another method by which you can bring content from press books into the LMS. So the idea here is from press books, if you didn't wanna do that common cartridge export import, there would be a press books launch link and it would be a content selector button. You would say select content and then it would show you all of the books that you have access to as an instructor. You'd be able to expand the button and you would be able to then see which of the chapters or links that I want to bring in and it would do the exact same thing. Whichever ones you selected, it brings them in and then you have working LTI links in your course for the content you've selected. We think this will be really exciting. We think it'll make just the LTI great or the loading of content in your LMS a lot easier with simplifying all of those processes and our dev team is excited because we're using a library that's well supported that's being updated and can comply with all of the specifications and standard needed for standard LTI. I know that was a little bit technical and LTI is not maybe an acronym that all of you are dealing with every day. So I do wanna pause here and take any questions large or small about any of the things that I just described there. So the second big thing that we've learned about the results pilot has to do with some H5P limitations and also what we're able to understand and store about learner records. One of the problems that we encountered that was a really difficult sticky problem was in order to use the grade pass back, you have to configure each individual chapter for grading because the chapter is what sends the grade score in press books. In press books, chapters can include multiple H5P activities and they can include automatically graded H5P activities as well as H5P activities that aren't automatically graded. They can include simple H5P activities like a single true-false question or compound H5P activities like a quiz, a question set or an interactive video that has multiple assessments. Now in the course of doing this pilot we've learned that simple compound activities are pretty different and that some compound activities are automatically graded every time and some might be automatically graded if they have gradable assessments and others might not be if they don't have gradable assessments. A problem that we encountered so far is that in order to configure your chapter for grading, we need to know, does it have automatically graded assignments in it? And we can't know that ahead of time with the way that H5P is currently configured. Because some activity types are automatically graded and others aren't depending on how they've been created and configured by the user. In addition, when the H5P activities created we currently don't have visibility into how many points it's worth until it has been attempted by a logged in user. And one of the consequences of that was it was a really time consuming tedious process for anyone who wanted to configure the chapter for grading. They had to make the H5P activities, they'd embed them in the chapter. Then they had to attempt them as logged in users. Then they had to configure the chapter for grading by choosing which ones they wanted to include. Then they had to import and bring the content in as a graded assignment and configure it further and beyond us. It was just too many steps and too complicated to be really worth the value that people got out of it. And so we paused that part of the pilot and we said, you know, there's not a viable simple workaround for us to make this user friendly. And so rather than inviting new people to go through the pain and experience of this, we're gonna take a step back and say, what is it that instructors really do want or need from this? Maybe it's not to be able to configure the whole chapters of graded activity. Maybe it's what we're learning is they wanna see the individual results of the activities but the single high level aggregate with the grade in the LNS is not providing as much value as we initially believed. Especially consider all the painful effort needed to get there. Another really difficult problem that we hit and encountered was H5P when embedded in press books does not natively know or care which chapter it was embedded in. It just knows that it was in a WordPress site. We care a lot which chapter it was embedded in because that's where we're trying to aggregate the score in the grade because we're trying to hook into H5P's grade or like reporting mechanism to store that information. We had to actually kind of hack in a creative way to find out what chapter it was embedded in. And it turns out that Safari and Apple devices block the method that we're using to find out what chapter it's embedded in as a security feature. And so students who were using the Safari browser or were launching activities from iPads and iPhones couldn't successfully submit scores even when they were doing the activities correctly. And that was a pretty big and massive barrier. Like there are workarounds. Don't use an Apple device or don't use a Safari but that just isn't acceptable for us as a production feature that we would use or that we would have our clients to use. And so we need to re-approach that and need to find some solution probably working with H5P which of course is not our software or our code. And those are the two big showstoppers that we hit that have caused us to pause taking new people into the results pilot until we can step back and work around those. The positive side I guess for all of this is that we've learned a ton about how to store detailed information about the attempts that students have made in H5P activities. And we've made some really good progress in being able to visualize those and to use LTI as a way of doing it. One of the ideas that we have is this is just a hot so we've gone back, we're talking with instructors finding out what they want and would want to use and what would be valuable to them rather than focusing on the specific implementation. And one of the ideas we have is something that would look a little bit more like this. So we're in the design stage. The idea would be in press books itself we can keep track of every attempt made by a logged in user in our database and we could provide a visualization that kind of looks like a grade book but for press book chapters. So in the top left you'd imagine this would be a specific press book chapter and we would have a dropdown that would let you see I want to see student scores for the first attempt student scores for their best attempt or student scores for the average attempt. And then if you change that this view would be dynamically updated. We could show you all of the students in your course as well as a class average. And then for each individual H5P activity that was embedded in the chapter we could give you a high level overall score as well as the overall score for all of the activities in the chapter. This would be something that we could provide as a launch link via LTI for press books and then the idea would be a drill down where if you wanted to say, so let's say this was a four question quiz and I wanted to know more about what students were getting right or wrong on that quiz I could then say drill down deeper into the activity or get an insights page that shows me for this chapter what are the questions that students are struggling with most what are the activities students having the biggest problem with? We're still at the kind of discovery and design stage for this but that's sort of how our thinking has been evolving and what we're asking people to do is rather than pilot and use the existing product that has these known problems or limitations they can if they really, really want to but we just think that the pain and the issues are probably not worth the value gained. What we really want to do is just do more discovery words and say instructors especially those of you who have been making interactives what is it you want to know? What's most valuable to you? And help us do some of the design thinking and the design work. So Michelle are you X UI designer and I and other people from press books team will be contacting any of the instructors that have told us they want to pilot this and do more of that design discovery thinking before we build the next iteration of what this looks like. And that's the update I wanted to give on press books results. A lot of this was obviously disappointing and hard for us because we didn't want to pause the pilot we didn't want it to fail in the ways that it failed but also we appreciate the flexibility that people have shown the graciousness and learning new things is always valuable even if what you've learned is not what you hoped you'd learn I guess is the takeaway. That was a lot there. I'm happy to take questions or a pause and kind of answer anything that you might want to have answered about what's happening with the LTI and press books results and the pilot. The next thing I want to show is kind of a preview of coming attractions and it's pretty exciting as well especially for institutions that are managing press books network that's shared by more than one institution or school. So this has come out of work that's being sponsored or funded by Ecampus Ontario. If Ecampus Ontario is a very large provincial organization that's running a pretty enormous press books network that's shared by I think upwards of 50 individual schools and colleges in the province. And as they've grown they've had a number of issues or problems where being able to manage a network that's that large and used by that many people has some bottleneck problems for the network administrators. Probably a lot of you can relate where you're like, wow our program's grown so successful that I'm the major bottleneck on this like I can't keep up with all the books and users and projects. I'm just one person or we're just three people. They wanted to be able to see more visibility into institutional use and have tools to share and administer press books on a large consortium network at the institutional level. And so we've contracted with them to or we're contracting with them to build a set of tools to help you manage a consortium network and keep track of institutions a bit better. And we're at the design stage now and I have some designs that I wanna show and an invitation for anyone who'd like to be involved in shaping the future of this. So Michelle and I have worked on what we call fat marker sketches and I'll just show a few of the interfaces that there we go. So these are called fat marker sketches and these are the interfaces that we are planning to build and we'll be working with clients to refine as we build these features in. The first idea is that on a press books network we don't have any native concept of an institution right now. Initially each network was owned by one institution so we didn't have this idea of many institutions on the same network. So the first thing that we'll be adding would be an institution list. And this would display a custom list of any institutions that might be sharing a single press books network. In the case of Ecampus, Ontario would be all the colleges in Ontario. In the case of Indiana, Kevin, you might say are you Bloomington, are you Kokomo, are you whatever or in the case of Washington you might have UW Bothell, UW Seattle, UW have you. You'd create the institution name and the institution could have one or more email domains and this will be useful later when I talk about users. We're also gonna create a new role that would be called institutional admin. Rather than having like full God powers for the whole network, they would be a little demigod. They would be able to administer books and users that belong to their institution only. So they would be like a network manager but for an institution in a larger network. So that would have a name and email address and network managers, you who run the whole network would be able to give and remove that power to users on your network. It would also display the number of books that are owned by that institution on your network and the number of users that are associated with that institution on your network as well as book limits and user limits if they've been set by the terms of your contract. So some consortium networks say, oh, this institution has 10 books dedicated to them and then it would keep track of that and display it here. From this page, there'd be a button to allow you to add a new institution and it'd be a really simple modal or simple field. You'd have the name of the institution, the email domains you wanna associate with it and then a selector that lets you pick a user from your network and assign them as an institutional admin or remove them as an institutional admin. The book limit and user limit would be set by us as press books by the super admins based on the terms of your contract. So it would be grayed out for you if you're a network manager but you would still see the value if you went to the edit page. So if you were to, we have some flows and designs here for how to create and edit institutions. Any questions or things that people wanna ask about that kind of basic functionality before I move on to the next stage? All right, so the next thing would be once you have institutions, then you need to be able to associate users to belong to the institution. If you have a thousand users, those users at the beginning would all be unaffiliated or belong to the consortia. But then you would need to be able to have a tool that lets you find them and associate them with their institution if you want them to belong to a specific institution. So the idea is we would display the username, the name and the email address and then what institution they belong to whether it's something or unassigned. You'd have a menu where you could bulk select, you could search. So usually you're probably gonna be filtering based on email domain. That's how you're gonna know what institution they belong to. So let's say you typed in uoregon.edu and you see everybody with the uoregon email address. I bulk select and I select Oregon from that list and then apply and it would then associate those users with the institution. As a network manager, you can still administer and see them from your user list. But they would then become visible in the user list of the institutional manager who'd be able to help those people and they'd be associated with that user account. The second thing is something very similar but for books. So the idea here would be we would display the cover of the book, the name and the URL of the book and what institution owns the book. Any book project can be owned by a single institution or be owned by the consortium or be unassigned. In order to help you make the determination we would then show you also who are the book admins and what institution do they belong to. Because you may not know like who's working on this book I'm not sure but if all three people are from Puget Sound then you're like, oh that book belongs to Puget Sound. Pretty easy for me to assign it to Puget Sound. And those are the kind of basic interfaces and initial tools that we'll be building that would be new to press books. The idea here is at the end of this you should be able to use press books as a multi-institution consortia and administer rights and permissions to help you administer the network really easily. You should be able to have visibility into usage across institutions. And you should be able to manage all of those things yourself as a network manager or have press books help you keep track of institutions however you like. And the same kind of book list, user list and statistics that we now provide at the whole network level would be then possible to do at the institution level as well so you can have the roll up view of the whole consortia as well as individual data views or book usage and user usage at individual institutions that would be dynamic and available to both network admins and institutional admins. I know that may not be relevant for those of you that are just single institution users but if you're watching this recording and you're a consortial user, that's what we're working on. Okay, so what's happening now is we're turning these fat marker sketches into what we call wireframes which means we're using templating software called Figma and Michelle will build interactive views of what I just showed you as a paper sketch. It won't be working software but it will be a thing that you can view, interact with and see what these flows look like and how they might behave before we actually build them in press books. At this stage of the design process, we take those wireframes and we share them with a bunch of clients who'd like to see them, like to understand it and give feedback on it. We have reached out to all of our big consortial clients and have invited them individually to participate in this feedback stage. If you are also interested and would also like to see those Figma files and give feedback, we'll be sharing it at the next monthly product update but you can also let me know or let us know and we'd happily include you in the co-designing process if you'd like to be involved in seeing those wireframes and giving feedback before we start building this as a working feature in press books. And that's kind of a model that we use for a lot of development. And so this is a good chance if you wanna see what it's like to work with us on designing larger features, this is a good opportunity to do so. You can let me know in the chat or by email or contact Michelle or I and we're happy to involve you as much or as little as you'd like in the design stage of this before it's implemented. Our target and goal is to have this as fully working, fully functional, all of these pieces. The end of March is the delivery deadline for the development contract that we have for campus Ontario. And we think it'll be consuming a lot of effort and energy for us probably through December, January, probably anywhere as well. So that's a little bit of a preview of some big features that are coming in the world. You know, I'm open to any questions you have about press books and the product or roadmap or goals before we jump into the community roundtable. Sure, I'm just wondering in terms of the book information, if it's possible for institutional information to be included within that, maybe as a notes field or something. And also maybe whether we can control visibility of it. Yeah, well, let me take the first part of that question and then I'll have to come back on the visibility thing to make sure I understand you. So currently in press books, we have already added the ability to indicate contributing institutions to the book info metadata. And I'll show you that feature right now. This is slightly different from what I was just describing with institutional management. But if you've made a book, you have all these metadata fields that you can enter. One of the metadata fields is the publisher. And this is the publisher of records. So we might say steel press. And the publisher is important metadata for anybody who's doing book publishing. But there's also this idea that a book may have been contributed to by an institution. So if I were to look for institutions, you'll see there's this little institutions list here. And I'm sorry, I just, I meant to, this is an optional field that can be used to display the institutions which created this resource.  So the idea here is I've listed, let's see six colleges or universities that collaborated to make this resource. If that's been saved, this will be displayed as part of the book metadata in a couple of places. One is if I visit this book's homepage, you'll see down at the bottom on all this metadata we display about the book, titles, et cetera, it's gonna show you the institutions who contributed to it. You'll also see that when you go to, I think I have this set up, where did I put my catalog for this? I'll get demo catalog. So here you can also see the institutions will show up in your catalog field and they can be filtered by there. They'll also show up in the press books directory. So if you wanna just indicate that institutions collaborated in making a book, that can already be done in the book info field and it gets displayed in the metadata and other things. This is a little bit different. It's like the owning institution and it provides like backend management to see like which books belong or being developed and updated and maintained by a given institution, even if it's not in their specific book info thing for public display. Couple of fields where we were looking to add some information we weren't quite sure where we might be able to put things that didn't seem to fall within the categories. That's a notes field. And then the question arose about would we be able to just basically have it as a notes field that could appear under the book info but probably not within the metadata display fields? Yeah, so depends on the kind of information but there's a couple of fields that can be used for that kind of like notes and creation information. I'll show you a few of them and you can tell me whether this would kind of meet your needs or not. But in book info, sorry, it's gonna take me a second to pull this up. In book info, the first thing you'll have obviously the title and short title but there is the first field that might be of interest is what we call the short description and the long description. The short description can be anything that you want so I've written a short description here and if you visit this book you'll see the short description is displayed right here at the top of the books, the subtitles displayed here, here's where the short description goes. So some people use this space to say, this is a collaborative project created by so-and-so or this is an introductory level chemistry textbook. There's also a longer description field that gets displayed down near the bottom whereas the longer descriptions show up right here under the book information page, the book description. And this is a field where sometimes people put much, much more text, they put links, they put resources, they put other things. This is a more capacious field and either or both of these can be used for that kind of notes about the book or a description of what the book is. If it's information about the copyright or how the book is licensed, you can insert a custom copyright notice with whatever information that you like. So I just put fake in there but this is also a space that people sometimes put information about how they'd like to be attributed or what specific terms of use they want to associate with the book. I don't know if that's the kind of notes that you're looking for maybe or if there's something else that you're hoping to describe about a book. And if so, let me know. I think these were fields that we didn't necessarily want to be displaying as part of the public persona of the book but would be like I said, for the institutional use and things that would help us document it. So if it's stored within the book like we could keep a separate database of this but we kind of want to keep it all together if we can and to store it within the book but it would be an institutional notes field is kind of what we were thinking which could be flexible and we could use but wouldn't necessarily have to display in those public versions of the book. Okay, interesting. So what you're describing I guess is like internal metadata about a booklet. Yeah. Here's a status update for a project or... I don't think it's anything super private. It just wouldn't be of any interest to anybody else. I don't think but within the institution there is this information we would want to include within if we were able to. So we were just trying to MacGyver something out of the field that we had to figure out how we could do that. And I thought, well, bring it up and just ask. So that, I don't think that's a feature that exists right now. It would need to be... And my question is how would you envision yourself using it or accessing it? Would you want it to be displayed in a uniform consistent way for all books? Someone would input it but then how would you imagine seeing it or using it from where in the interface? Would you want to see it? Well, I think it could relate. Like one of the challenges that we're looking at is institutional turnover. And so if somebody maybe authored a book the copyright belongs to the institution. This is the example I'm making up on the spot but we might want to actually track who the original author was but maybe that's not necessarily something we would want to display in the current version of the book but we might want to keep that as part of the institutional record related to that book. So like I said, we could have a completely separate mechanism to try to do that but it might be nice to actually be able to keep it within the book. That's just an example off the top of my head. There are several other things that we've been thinking about that we might want to include in an institutional field that would be accessible but not a public field. Most like I said, because it's probably just of no interest to anybody except a few people within the institution relative to the history of the book. I see the value of having a notes field about a book that's visible for administrators but isn't displayed on public metadata. I think probably Donna, what we would need to do is I need to talk with you more about how to shape this into a feature idea and how to put it into our backlog. So conversation offline sometime, I think I can give you a link and you can book me and we can talk about it. And that's probably how we'd want to proceed on that but thanks for bringing that up. And then it's not a feature in restrooms now we need to be built but I can see a little bit of the shape of what you're talking about. Is there anything else? So the portion of the meeting now I guess is the community roundtable. This is a chance for you to share any news or updates or things that you've been working on that you think would be of interest to the larger group. So I just asked Alia from the University of Oregon to share a pretty cool feature that she's been working on developing there. Recently in press books we started providing more detailed information about page views and book file downloads for each book across certain time span periods. It's available in the network admin dashboard and it uses some of the Cocoa Analytics page view data and the individual book download data that we track. And Alia has whipped up something really cool in a visualization tool that they use at work. And I've asked her to share that with the group. All right, can everybody see that? Great, okay. So this is as like Steel said this uses Power BI which is a database tool that we use at U of O. And this is just this page uses mostly at the press books Cocoa Analytics and then the rest of the report and uses a lot of Google Analytics except for this map, that's all Google. And then I pretty much just have it set up so you can select any of the books on our network that are public and take a look at their got page views, visitors and downloads over here, download type and all of that is only from press books. I found Google does not do a good job with those download numbers for us. And then this is just a table displaying the same data. You have a lot of information about refers. I'm still trying to figure out what's most helpful to our instructors. I got a request last week about providing information about link clicks like what links are students using the most and what so trying to figure out like what's valuable and that instructor is also gonna do a survey to his students to get anecdotal feedback in addition to this analytics feedback. But yeah, we have this page on the most viewed chapters from all the books and yeah, well, if anyone is interested in doing a similar project, always happy to talk about this process. It's been really fun. And I've gotten to explore the Google Analytics API which was new to me. Yeah, so, but we really love the new press books analytics. It's made this possible and much better, I think. And I really love what you're showing. So thanks for doing that. I really kept everybody a little bit over time. I apologize for that. Thank you so much for coming out here in November. We will not be having a monthly product update in December because of the holidays. So enjoy the end of the year and we'll see you in 2024 with the brave new year and brave new everything. Appreciate all that you do and thanks for coming out. See you then.


So thanks, Rio, for the introduction. So I'll be presenting on watermarking public key cryptographic primitives. And this is joint work with Richo, Goyle, Sam Kim, Brent Waters, and David Wu. So we heard this in the previous talk, but just to quickly recap. When we think about watermarking programs, there are two basic algorithms. There's a mark algorithm, which takes his input, a program models a circuit, and some tag tau, or mark, and outputs a circuit C prime that indicates the mark circuit. And then there's an extract algorithm that takes his input, some circuit C prime, and output to either a tag or bot. So the tag would indicate that the program was marked with the tag tau or bot would indicate that the program was unmarked. Okay, and the way I've defined these algorithms, they're in the fully public setting, meaning that the mark and extract algorithms aren't taking any secrets, but you can also consider secret marking and extraction settings where these algorithms require secrets that are held by some trusted watermarking authority. And there are two main properties that we want out of a watermarking scheme. The first is functionality preserving, which is basically saying that the mark circuit should preserve the functionality of the unmarked circuit. And the second is unremovability, which basically says that given a marked circuit, it should be difficult for an adversary to create another circuit that preserves the functionality of the circuit yet removes the mark. And so what is known so far, well, in the work of Cohen et al, they gave the first positive results for watermarking, assuming indistinguishability obfuscation. And since then, the focus has been on watermarking pseudo-random functions from standard assumptions. And they've been a series of works by Kim and Wu, Quash, Wix, and Zardellis, and then Kim and Wu again, the previous talk. And basically, the focus so far has been on watermarking secret key primitives. And basically secret key primitives were already quite challenging to watermark. And since they have less structure or less complex than public key primitives, it was just assumed that public key primitives would be much more or more challenging to watermark in secret key primitives. And this hasn't been adequately studied. So in this work, we ask, can we watermark public key primitives? And in particular, the public key primitives we watermark in this work are digital signatures, in particular the signing functionality of a digital signature scheme, and public key attribute-based or predicate encryption, in particular the decryption functionality. Okay, so what was known prior to our work? Well, in the work of Coen and All, they did show, assuming indistinguishability obfuscation, how to build watermarkable signatures and public key encryption. So a natural question for our work is can we watermark these public key primitives from standard assumptions? And in this work, we show the answer as yes, and in fact, we can do this surprisingly simply. So our main contributions are watermarking constructions. We give watermarkable signatures and watermarkable attribute-based and predicate encryption. But our other contribution comes on the definitional side. Basically, the existing definitions in the literature had some insufficiencies and issues, which we address in this work and give what we believe are appropriate definitions for watermarking these primitives. And just to quickly state what some of these issues are, as defined in the literature, the KeyGen and Mark algorithms were paired, collusion resistance was not handled, and the unremovable notion ruled out valid attacks. This is the most devastating of the issues with the definitions currently in the literature. And now I'm just gonna go into a little bit more detail about the definitional issues. So for right now, I'm just gonna focus on the signatures aspect of the definitions. So as defined in Coen et al, there was a MarkGen algorithm, so the KeyGen and Mark algorithms were paired. So there was a MarkGen algorithm that took as input a tag tau and now put it a verification key, signing key tuple, where the signing key is marked with a tag tau. And the issue with this definition is, first of all, there's no notion of an unmarked signing key, right? The signing key is generated when this algorithm is given a tag tau, so in this diagram, there's only a marked signing key. And the other issue with this is that collusion resistance is not defined, right? Because the signing key is only generated when given a tag, it isn't possible to generate many marked versions of the same signing key with different tags. Okay, so this is not that big an issue, it's not very difficult to fix. We simply separate these algorithms, right? So we have a separate KeyGen algorithm and a Mark algorithm. So our KeyGen algorithm is first gonna generate a verification signing key pair, and then the Mark algorithm will take as input the signing key and a tag tau, and output a Mark circuit C sub tau that inputs this Mark signing key functionality. I mean, this new formulation of the definition, as you can see, there's an unmarked signing key now, right, the initial signing key output by the KeyGen algorithm. And also, it is easy to generate many marked versions of the same signing key, right? Because you can simply run the Mark algorithm with the same signing key and many different tags. Okay, now I'm gonna go into the issue with the unremovability definition. And so to do this, I have to describe the game in a little bit of detail. So the way the unremovability game is captioned and watermarking is there's a game between an adversary and a challenger. And what happens is the adversary picks some tag tau and sends it to the challenger, and is given back a circuit that implements a Mark signing key that is marked with this tag. And then the adversary's goal is to output some circuit C star. And what are the conditions required by the adversary? Well, so we're required that the adversary's circuit agrees with the Mark circuit on an epsilon fraction of inputs. Just think of epsilon as some, one by poly more than one half. So just like some majority fraction of inputs. And the other property or the adversary wins the game, basically, if the circuit output of the adversary is not considered to be marked with the tag tau. So the adversary has succeeded in removing the Mark, but has preserved the functionality on some fraction of inputs. And at first glance, this definition seems completely reasonable. And this is the definition given in Cohen at all. But there are some issues with this definition. And to illustrate this, just to give a quick example. So just suppose the Mark circuit was on the following form. Suppose C sub tau of X, simply outputted the tag tau in the clear, and then outputted a signature on X. And the tag tau and the signature are completely independent. So from a watermarking perspective, this thing should be considered completely broken. Okay, why is that? Well, there's a trivial adversarial unmovable strategy, which is to simply take this Mark circuit and restrict it to only output the second tuple. So it only outputs the signature now, and the tag is nowhere to be found. And this can easily be done. And now the adversary has succeeded in removing the tag, but the functionality has been completely preserved. This adversary's unmarked circuit outputs signatures everywhere. Okay, now what is the problem with the unremovability definition? Well, observe as stated, the adversary is required to output a circuit that agrees with the Mark circuit exactly, and the input output behavior must be preserved exactly on a majority of inputs. And in particular, that rules out this attack strategy, right, because this unmarked circuit, this attack, this unmarked circuit stated down there does not output the tag on any input. So this attack would not be admissible in the security game, and therefore under the security definition, this broken scheme would be considered provably secure under this unremovability notion. So how do we fix this issue? Well, the offending line is basically the fact that the functionality must be preserved exactly, the exact input output behavior. But what is the functionality of a signature scheme really? It's not necessarily the input output behavior is exactly preserved, rather the adversary circuit is useful if it can output a signature that verifies. So in our definition, we change the condition on the adversary to simply say that the adversary circuit outputs signatures that verify on say a majority of inputs. And the adversary's wind condition remains the same. Okay, so now I've put our definition on the left. Now let's see why is this fixed the problem? Well, in this example before, the adversary's unmarked circuit still outputs signatures. So the adversary's circuit will still verify everywhere with respect to the verification algorithm, yet the tag is nowhere to be found and the circuit will be considered unmarked. Okay, so now that I've dealt with, yeah, so now the broken scheme is considered to be broken properly under this definition. So furthermore, we can handle unruly also with this notion of collusion resistance where the adversary is now allowed to make an unbounded polynomial number of queries to a marking oracle and receive back the same mark signing key marked with many different tags. And the adversary's wind condition is now just modified to say the adversary wins if the extract algorithm doesn't output any of the tags for which it has been given a mark signing key. Okay, so now that I've talked about one of the main properties, let's talk about the other one, functionality preserving. So a natural definition for functionality preserving would basically be that the marked circuit should equal the unmarked signing algorithm almost everywhere. The input output behavior should be exactly preserved. But that leads us to the natural question, like what is functionality preserving for signatures? Is it really that the input output behavior is exactly preserved or is it the signature actually verifies? To try to illustrate this, suppose you have some official document that you wanna get approved, all you care about is that this document has been approved, right? You don't care exactly what the approval stamp on the document looks like. And so in this spirit in this work, our functionality preserving definition says that the marked circuit is only required to output signatures that verify with respect to the verification algorithm everywhere. It doesn't have to preserve the input output behavior exactly and output the same string. Okay, so now I've described how we defined watermarking signatures in this work. I'm gonna go into the construction. So what do we achieve? We achieve a watermarkable signature scheme that is from minimal assumptions, just the existence of signatures. And it is a fully public scheme. There's no reliance on any trusted watermarking authority. And all the prior work and the PRF constructions all required a trusted watermarking authority for either secret marking and or extraction. So the first fully public scheme. Moreover, we obtain full collusion resistance, meaning that in the security gain, the adversary can see the signing key marked with as many different tags of its choice. And all the previous constructions, we're not at all collusion resistant. All the PRF constructions and the IO constructions, meaning that even if the adversary saw the same signing key marked with two different tags, the scheme would be broken. So we've gone from basically no collusion resistance to full collusion resistance here. Okay, so how do we actually construct this? The construction is surprisingly simple and follows from standard signature techniques. So the unmarked circuit is just a simple signing algorithm. On a message M, it just simply outputs a signature. Okay, now, how does the mark algorithm work? Well, to mark with a tag tau, what first happens is you generate a new verification key signing key pair. And once that's done, the mark key is this new verification signing key pair along with the tag and the certificate signature under the original signing key of this verification key tag pair. Okay, now, how do you sign with this marked key? Well, you output this new verification key and the tag and the clear along with the certificate signature and then you sign the message M with the new signing key escape prime. Okay, now, why does this work? So how do you verify? To verify signatures from the unmarked signing key, you simply run the verification algorithm. And to verify signatures signed by the marked key, you do a two-step verification process where you first verify that the certificate signature is indeed a valid signature on this new verification key and the tag tau. And then once that's done, you also check that this signature on the message M verifies with respect to the new signing key escape prime. And if both checks pass, you say that the signature verifies. Okay, now, how would you extract, or, oh, sorry, observe here that the marked circuit outputs different signatures, clearly different signatures, than the unmarked circuit here, but both verify with respect to the verification procedure. Okay, so now, how would you extract? Well, the extraction procedure is very simple. You can simply just find tau in a valid signature. That is, you sample random messages, see what the circuit outputs and if a signature verifies in a marked circuit, the signature will be of the signatures of the form of a marked signature and you can just take tau straight from the signature. Okay, and why does unremovability follow? Well, if you look at the marked key, there's no information about the signing key in there except a signature on this verification key tag pair. So in particular, for an adversary to produce a signature by the unmarked algorithm, it would have to produce a forgery or to produce a signature by the marked algorithm. It would also have to produce a forgery on a different certificate of VK prime and tau, which it can't do. So in particular, the only kind of signatures you can output are signatures in a marked form where the tag tau is in the clear and it can be extracted. Okay. And just note that the extract algorithm in our construction does need to know the verification key in order to extract. However, this is assumed to be public, so this is not that big of a deal. Okay, and I don't have a lot of time to talk about our second construction, but just briefly, I'm just gonna say, so the other construction is on watermarking the decryption functionality of a public key predicate or attribute-based encryption scheme. And so what are our main results here? Well, we obtain secret marking and extraction fully collusion resistant watermarkable attribute-based encryption. And we obtain fully public bounded collusion resistant watermarkable predicate encryption. And the way we do this is using techniques that's conceptually similar to the notion of attribute-based trader tracing. And another property of this construction is we achieve stronger unroovability guarantees. In particular, our unroovability guarantees of a distinguished instead of a decryption flavor, like in trader tracing. And what I mean by that is that the adversary, even an adversary that outputs a circuit that is only good at decrypting two different messages encrypted under the same attribute, it can only distinguish between two types of ciphertexts against an adversary that outputs a circuit that's only good at distinguishing between two different types of encryptions, we can still recover the tag. So it doesn't need to be a good decryptor for basically almost anything, it just has to be able to get a good distinguisher between two types of encryptions and we can still recover the tag. Okay, and just to go in a little more detail on our construction of collusion resistant watermarkable AVE. So to just provide some intuition, we observed some parallels between trader tracing and watermarkable encryption. So for those not familiar, a trader tracing scheme is basically some public key encryption scheme where you can give out different secret keys to different users with the property that if some subset of users collude and create some like pirate decryption algorithm together, there exists some trace algorithm that can recover from this pirate decryptor one of the users that colluded to construct it. And this should intuitively seem similar to this notion of watermarkable encryption in the sense that like these mark keys kind of are like user decryption keys, right? Because the adversary is seeing many marked keys and then combines all these marked keys to try to come up with some like pirate circuit, some circuit where the mark has been removed, right? And an extraction should be sort of thought of as tracing, even given this pirate decoder or given this circuit that has been constructed by the adversary, you should still be able to extract or trace to recover the mark or like one of the users in the colluding set. So there's hopefully just some intuition as to how we might be able to achieve this using techniques from trader tracing. And basically we were able to do this using tools recently developed in the trader tracing literature, in particular the notion of mixed functional encryption introduced by Goyal, Coppola and Waters. And of course we needed attribute based encryption. Okay, so what are the main takeaways from our work? Well, we gave simple constructions of watermarking for public key primitives, right? We showed from one way functions or signatures how to get watermarkable signatures and we showed using mixed functional encryption and attribute based encryption how to get watermarkable AB or predicate encryption. And the other takeaway is that we strengthened definitions of watermarking and gave what we believe are appropriate definitions for watermarking these primitives, okay? And so this work leads to some natural open questions. Are there other ways to watermark other different cryptographic primitives simply from standard assumptions, right? In this work we showed that even public, even though public key primitives are more complex, seem more complex than secret key primitives, they can actually be watermarked quite simply. And maybe this holds for other cryptographic primitives for which watermarking has not been studied. Another natural open question is, can we obtain fully collusion resistant, fully public watermarkable AB? Recall in order to get this full collusion resistance we required a secret marking and an extraction. And the final open question I have is are there better or new definitions for watermarking, right? Because what our work shows sort of is that getting definitions for watermarking can be quite tricky and it's often tailored to the exact functionality that you want to watermark. So this is definitely a direction for future study. Thank you. If you have a question, please come to the microphone. I have two questions. Okay. One is, is there any particular applications of the collusion resistant watermarkable signatures? I mean, so for watermarked public inclusion is almost the same as trader tracing, right? Right, it's conceptually related to trader tracing, yes. So for signature case, is there any application of collusion resistant watermarkable signature? That's a good question. I mean, you might want to like, right, you might want to watermark your signature with different tags and be able to give them out to different users, right? Be able to put in names to different users and then have the property that these users cannot, right? Like this seems like a reasonable thing you might want to do, right? This seems related to group signatures or something. Okay. Yeah. So the second one is, so you said achieved collusion resistant watermarkable AB, right? So collusion resistant means, I think there are two aspects. I mean, collusion resistant AB or collusion resistant watermarking, which one do you refer? Yeah, so we get collusion resistant watermarking. Okay. The watermark is able to get the encryption circuit marked with unbounding polynomial number of tags. So it means as an ABE, it's not free collusion resistant or free collusion resistant. No, no, we've noted from collusion resistant ABE but bounding collusion resistant makes that be. Okay. Yes. More questions? Okay. So it's because again.


Hello and welcome to the session, my name is Asha and I shall be helping you with the following question that says, in each of the following exercise 10 to 20, find the equation of further LFs that satisfies the given conditions, 17 minus pokai plus minus 3 comma 0 and a is equal to 4. So, let us now start with the solution and please refer to the earlier before solving this problem to get an idea of an LFs whose major axis is along the x-axis. So we are given here that pokai is plus minus 3 comma 0 and the value of a is equal to 4 and since here as we can see the y coordinate of pokai is 0, therefore the pokai are on the x-axis. So, this implies that the major axis is along the x-axis since the two pokai lie on the major axis. Therefore, the equation will be of the form x square upon a square plus y square upon b square is equal to 1 where a is the length of semi major axis and b is the length of semi minor axis. Now, the pokai of this standard equation given by plus minus c comma 0 and here we are given the pokai as plus minus 3 comma 0. So, on comparing we find that c is equal to 3 and also we are given that a is equal to 4 and as we know c which is the distance of focus from the center is given by root over a square minus b square where c is the distance of focus from the center and it is substituted the value of c and a to get the value of b we have 3 is equal to root over 4 square minus b square or we have b square is equal to 16 minus 9 and this is equal to 7. Therefore, we have b square is equal to 7 and a square is equal to a is 4. So, we have 4 square is equal to 16. Now, let us substitute b square is equal to 7 and a square is equal to 16 and this is standard equation to get the equation of an ellipse. Therefore, equation of ellipse is given by x square upon 16 plus y square upon 7 is equal to 1. Hence, the answer is equation of an ellipse whose pokai is plus minus 3 comma 0 and a is equal to 4 is x square upon 16 plus y square upon 7 is equal to 1. So, this completes the session. Hope you have understood it well. Take care and have a good day.