Course Readings | What’s New?

By Tan Poh Lay, Wong Kar Wei and Zaleha Othman

 

Learning Management System lets faculty manage activities related to students’ learning in a module/course. This can include setting up the syllabus, lesson plans, assignments and readings. The readings (known as E-Reserves in LumiNUS) come under a library service that provides course-related materials through our libraries’ subscribed e‐resources and scanned PDFs that have been checked for copyright compliance.

In 2021, NUSIT and CIT conducted a comprehensive review of the available learning management systems and recommended the adoption of Canvas as a replacement for LumiNUS. The transition to Canvas was to take place over two semesters, starting from AY2022/23 Semester 1. By AY2022/2023 Semester II, all faculty have to be fully on board. With this mandate, we were asked to find a suitable E-Reserves management system that works with Canvas.

NUS Libraries conducted a review of available systems in early 2022 with the aim of streamlining processes to save time and manpower, and to allow faculty to upload readings without library’s help. eReserves Plus was eventually recommended for adoption. The service is known as Course Readings in Canvas. Between April to July 2022, the team worked tirelessly to get the system ready for faculty’s and students’ use. This involved migrating thousands of readings from LumiNUS E-Reserves to Course Readings, developing and integrating into the system a Copyright Declaration process and creating a Course Reading guide to assist faculty in setting up their reading lists in Canvas.

Course Readings was launched in July 2022. It offers many upgraded functionalities:

  • Faculty enjoys greater autonomy in uploading their course readings – they can search through our extensive collection to add readings at their own convenience
  • A seamless Copyright Declaration process which is integrated into Course Readings thereby eliminating the need for faculty to enter information in another system
  • Provides analytics of student engagement with the readings — another huge plus for faculty to stay on top their students’ learning

 

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