Proposed by Cath Ellis on 30/Sep/2011

Summary

Easily allow individual references from a list to be embedded into other web pages (e.g. blog posts or UniLearn pages).

Cath Says…

This is something I’m keen to see developed because it would allow me to drop individual readings into specific moments in my curriculum design rather than linking through to the whole list which I’m currently doing. This would be most useful if, at a particular point, I want all students to read the same reading before moving on to the next task. This is a bit like the old ‘reading bricks’ or workbooks we used to build as paper-based resources but in an electronic form.

This would work best for resources which are available electronically – eBooks and eReadings in particular.

(Cath Ellis, School of Music Humanities & Media)

Dave Says…

We’ve got an “alpha” prototype of this already (see this blog post) but it needs some more development work.

Ideally, we’d want to carry across all of the functionality that a reference has within a reading list (which currently includes being able to rating and notes) into the embeddable version.

(Dave Pattern, Library Systems Manager)

Development Difficulty – 3 out of 10

Normally, embeddable versions of things — such as Slideshare presentations, YouTube videos, etc — use an HTML iframe as they have a fixed height and width. Because the individual references take up variable amounts of space, it means we’ll have to use jQuery and Ajax to do the actual embedding.

Who Benefits?

Academic staff and students.

Have Your Say!

If you have any thoughts about this idea, please leave a comment using the form below

If you have any idea of your own that you’ve like to put to the vote, please send an email to myreading@hud.ac.uk with the details!

(This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of enhancement requests and development suggestions for the MyReading software. To help the library prioritise development, you can vote and we’ll take forward the most popular ideas first!)

Proposed by Cheryl Reynolds on 29/Sep/2011

Summary

Allow students and/or members of staff to create new reading lists “on-the-fly” that aren’t linked to a module in ASIS.

Cheryl Says…

We have 20 modules that are non standard, with a total of 1,200 trainee teachers accessing them. On ASIS all 1,200 are together in a single module, but for the purposes of our delivery, separate, non standard modules are created on UniLearn for trainee teachers of a particular specialism.

It would make far more sense and give a better justification for the extra work involved if they were transferring to MyReading instead, which is all round better.

(Cheryl Reynolds)

Dave Says…

The initial phase of development was for supporting reading lists for every module on ASIS. Whenever a new module is added to ASIS, a new reading list page should get automatically generated. However, ultimately, the idea is for anyone to be able to create a new list within the system, independently of ASIS.

Some suggestions for these ad-hoc lists are:

• provide a facility for students to bookmark references on module readings lists and those references would appear on a separate personal/private list
• allow staff to create new lists (perhaps even temporary ones) to support teaching

One thing to note is that ad-hoc lists wouldn’t feed into the library acquisitions process in the way that lists linked to ASIS modules would. In other words, if you added a book reference, the library wouldn’t be alerted that they might need to buy extra copies. This is for a couple of reasons: the library wouldn’t know what the purpose of the list was (e.g. is it a personal collection of references or is it a list to support teaching) and we wouldn’t know how many students the list was for if it was to support teaching (which is data we get from ASIS). For those reasons, we’d encourage staff to primarily use ASIS for new modules.

In terms of timescales, this is something we’d probably hope to have ready by the end of the 2011/12 academic year. However, if it gets a high vote, we’ll move it up the priority list.

(Dave Pattern, Library Systems Manager)

Development Difficulty – 6 out of 10

This will require a fair amount of development time however, as this is something we’d already planned for, it won’t require any alteration of existing code.

Who Benefits?

Academic staff and students.

Have Your Say!

If you have any thoughts about this idea, please leave a comment using the form below

If you have any idea of your own that you’ve like to put to the vote, please send an email to myreading@hud.ac.uk with the details!