Track Changes

Track Changes

Updates & Corrections to APSE
A Political Science Experiment is continually growing and expanding. This page provides detailed descriptions of any updates to the APSE website, chapter text, and other materials.
  • Content Changes
  • Web Changes
    • We are excited to release the official First Edition of APSE, thereby concluding the Beta phase of our launch. This edition features:
      • The All Chapters Collection, which compiles all available chapters into one volume, now available in the right column of the Chapters page.
      • A new Global Politics chapter by Brandon Valeriano, Ben Jensen, and Miguel Gomez.
      • A new Foreword by our editors, Andrew Rudalevige and Joshua Tucker.
      • A full redesign designed to improve readability and the user experience.
    • This edition’s Collection is now also available for institutional bulk purchase (e.g. inclusive access, campus bookstores) through both VitalSource and RedShelf under ISBN 9798987326718. Individual chapters will remain exclusive to the APSE site.
    • First Edition versions of individual chapters will be added at the start of summer, along with new chapters, and these will eventually replace the Beta versions. To minimize course disruption and ensure students keep their notes, these previous versions will remain in students’ accounts via the Purchased Chapters page. We will provide more information about this transition in the coming months.
    • The Chapters page is now divided into two columns, with individual chapters on the left and Collections on the right.
      • Collections are compilations of chapters, made available for students’ to minimize transaction fees and access all the chapters in one volume. We hope to add more Collections as APSE grows.

    • Students will now see a clearer error message when they do not select their instructor from the auto-populating drop-down list. The option to enter their instructor’s name manually is now larger and more legible.
    • Students will now receive a welcome email confirming their account has been created successfully, along with brief instructions for how to use our site. This automated email had been mistakenly disabled for longer than we intended.

    • Registration/landing page has been redesigned to be clearer and more intuitive. Each registration form has been changed to ask for only the most relevant information about each user.
      • All users are now asked to confirm their email address and password to minimize errors.
      • A CAPTCHA has been added to prevent spam/bot registrations without shutting out legitimate users.
    • Added Teaching Assistant registration option and site role. Users who register as Teaching Assistants will have the same access to materials as Instructors. We created this separate role to (1) tailor our communications and (2) verify instructors more efficiently.
      • Users can freely change their account from Instructor to Teaching Assistant and vice versa from their account dashboard.
    • Established a 90-Day Sampling Period for all instructors, including teaching assistants.
      • Instructors will lose access to our materials after 90 days if they do not provide more information about their course on the My Courses page. This period begins when an instructor is verified. Adding a course to your profile will extend sampling access indefinitely, even after the 90 days have already ended.
      • We have introduced this measure to better distinguish registered instructors who are assigning and teaching APSE from those who are still browsing what we have to offer. We are also using the data provided in My Courses to verify TAs more efficiently, and to get a sense of which chapters are more or less popular. We are not selling or sharing this data with anyone outside of our organization.
    • Updated the account dashboard menu for instructors, including teaching assistants. We eliminated extraneous WordPress defaults and updated our web copy so that this section of our site makes more sense.