Offline Access

Miami UBooks (Unizin Engage platform) includes offline features. These features let you read your course material when you don't have internet access, whether over only a brief moment of lost connectivity or an extended time off-line for which you planned in advance.

Special Browser Requirements for Offline Features

You do not need to download a plugin or otherwise turn on the offline features, but you must use a browser that supports the underlying technology. The offline features depend on a technology called Service Workers, which is currently supported by the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers. As other browsers begin to support Service Workers, the offline functionality in Engage will be supported in those browsers as well.

You can tell whether your browser supports the offline features of Engage in two ways:

  • Click the Offline menu button that appears in the header.
  • Click the Applications button that appears on the User menu.

Offline requirements.

You still may be able to use the other features of Miami UBooks (Unizin Engage) in browsers that do not support Service Workers even though the offline features will not work. 

Temporarily Lost Connectivity

If you temporarily lose connectivity while using the Miami UBooks (Unizin Engage) platform, the page of the content you are currently reading remains available in read-only mode. You may not realize that you have lost connectivity because the platform does not register that you are offline until you try to use one of the features that is unavailable while offline.

When Miami UBooks (Unizin Engage) does register that you are offline, it presents a message to let you know that you have no internet connection. If you have reconnected to the internet, you can click the Refresh the page button to force Engage to reconnect. You can always return to the Courses view, regardless of whether you have internet connectivity.

Preparing to Work Offline

If you know that you are going to want to use Miami UBooks in offline mode for an extended period of time, you can download your course materials to your computer so that they are available to Engage when you no longer have internet connectivity.

While you are offline, you will not be able to log in to your LMS to access the link to the Miami UBooks. You should create a bookmark to Miami UBooks (Unizin Engage) in your browser before your offline work so that you have an easy way to access the text.

You must have a valid session in your browser in order to access Miami UBooks (Unizin Engage) offline, so you should log in to your Miami UBook from your Canvas course site as late as possible before your period of offline use to ensure that your session remains valid for as long as possible. It is important that you not click the Logout button to leave Miami UBooks (Engage) because logging out ends your session. If your session ends, you will lose all of the content that you have downloaded for offline use. Instead, you can just close the browser window without logging out.

Downloading and Syncing Content

You must download each Miami UBook material while you have internet access in order to read it while you are offline. Use the following steps to download the content for future offline use:

  1. Go to the Courses view.
  2. Find the course material that you want to download.
  3. Click the blue circle icon with three dots that appears in the upper right-hand corner of the material tile.
  4. Choose Keep on device.

An indicator appears on the tile showing the progress of the download. This process may take a while and the course material content can take up a lot of storage on your computer.

Note: If the download fails for any reason, the progress indicator is replaced with a restart icon. Click the icon to restart the download.

Currently, Miami UBooks does not automatically retrieve the latest annotations on your content when you are online. You can sync the annotations between the offline and online copies of the materials by using these steps:

  1. Click the Offline menubutton on the header.
  2. Click the Sync data

Going Back Online

After you have worked offline, the system may not immediately register when you reconnect to the internet. Use these steps to force Miami UBooks (Engage) to reconnect:

  1. Click the Offline menu.
  2. Click the Reconnect button.