Reading Lists & You!: A Guide to Finding Your Course Material

For some people, autumn is leaf peeping, or warm tea lattes on a rainy day, or maybe pulling out your favorite orange sweaters. But for me, autumn is course reserve season! And today, I’d like to share some info about the Reading List tool in your Canvas courses.

The Reading List feature on Canvas serves one specific purpose: it consolidates your course material. Since library staff have some admin privileges, we can go through courses and see the same materials you do. We, at the library, add required textbooks (and maybe a PDF or two) that we have found in your professor’s syllabus to the Reading List tool. We prepare those materials and add them to a course’s Canvas page. Then, professors can add articles or other resources to the same Reading List. Thus, an entire course’s reading can be accessible all in one place.

Or, if a professor has liked a previous Reading List, they can simply “roll” that list over for their current course.

Everything on a Reading List either has a link directly to the resource, or tells you exactly where to find the physical copy. No need to download or flip through the syllabus every time you need a resource; nor do you have to search for resources yourself. This tool is great for organizing resources and updating the list as the course continues.

And, if you happen to need to, you can always report a resource or link being broken directly on the site. We check these all the time to ensure students and faculty can access their resources without much trouble.

Working closely with faculty about their use of the Reading List has contributed a lot to the program itself. Reading Lists has changed features due to our feedback, so as more people use it we can report more concrete suggestions for improvement. And this includes all of you! We enjoy hearing the ways you all interact with the tool.

We hope to hear how you use the tool soon. And, don’t forget to email us if you have any questions about finding your course material or accessing articles.

And, as an aside, I highly recommend a Darjeeling tea with steamed milk. There is no better time of year to try it. Happy fall!