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Faculty Support

Integrating Library Resources, Services and Librarians into Canvas

This is your guide to putting the library to work in your Canvas courses. The following are suggestions of ways to integrate information sources, instruction, and librarian support into your courses.

 

Review the library research guide (LibGuide) in your course

Library Guides

At FGCU, each Canvas course will have an auto-populated a link to Library Guides. FGCU Librarians have done their best to identify the most appropriate existing research guide for each course on offer.

Take a moment to examine the Library Guide in your courses and contact your subject librarian if you have any questions or suggestions for additional resources or alternatives to what you find.

Subject librarians are eager to work with you to create something that will help your students do great research for you class!

 

Enable Reading Lists in Canvas Courses

To access and use Reading Lists in your Canvas Courses, you'll need to enable Reading Lists in each course in which you want to display a reading list. You have two options for adding reading lists to Canvas:


Add Reading Lists to course navigation

1. Log in to Canvas and navigate the course where you would like to use reading list. 

2. Select Settings at the bottom of the left sidebar.

3. Select Navigation

screenshot of canvas

4. Scroll all the way down to the end of the list of navigation elements. Find Reading Lists and enable. Make sure to click save after you enable. Scroll down if you do not see the Save button.

screenshot of enabling a navigation element in CanvasNow you will see "Reading Lists" show up in the side navigation for your course. ​​​​​​screenshot of a reading list in a canvas course


 

From here, you can create a new list for this course or associate a list that is already in your reading list account to this course.

Include YouTube videos

The Library has a YouTube channel with short videos that help explain how to use databases, search for articles and more. You can grab links for the channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/fgculibraryservices)  or for individual videos and put them into your course where ever you want to use them (a page, module, etc.).
On a page for a YouTube video, look under the video player window for the link that says “Share” to find the shareable URL for the video. Copy that URL and you can paste it into a Canvas page and it will automatically embed the video into the page.

Canvas Page Example with Embedded Video

Embedded Video Example

 

Invite a librarian to join your class

You can add your subject liaison librarian to your Canvas course. The librarian can be available as a resource to answer questions in a discussion forum or you can invite the librarian to put together a package or module of resources especially for your class. If you like the idea of putting links to course reserves, articles, videos, and or library research guides in your courses, but aren’t sure you want to do it all yourself, invite your librarian to collaborate with you on the project!
To add a librarian to your course:

  1. Make sure you know who your librarian is and what their email address is.
  2. Open your course in Canvas.
  3. Go to the “People” menu in the lefthand navigation.
  4. Click on the blue +People in the top right portion of the white content area.
  5. Type in the email address of the librarian you want to add. Choose the “Librarian” role from the dropdown menu. Click the blue Next button.
  6. Once the address is validated then click Add Users button. Now the librarian will receive a notification that they have been added to your course and can start working with you to provide the library support you are looking for in the course.