I’ve been working with the Online Services Team in ICT to develop a set of pages for presenting our new reading lists system to students and staff in our Blackboard VLE.
When the next academic year’s Blackboard ‘Sites’ go live in a couple of weeks, all module and award Sites will include a “Reading List” button in the Site menu as a default. (It’ll also be available as an option to add to other types of Blackboard Sites and Communities.)
When a user clicks on this button, Blackboard will invoke the Talis Aspire list linking API. The API will take the Blackboard Site ID (e.g.: SOW3007M-1213), strip off the academic session suffix (-1213) and poll lists.library.lincoln.ac.uk to see if one or more reading lists is associated with the module/award code (SOW3007M).
If there is no reading list associated with that code, students will see a generic apology screen:
We’re sorry…
No online reading list can be found for this Blackboard Site. A reading list may be available as part of the Site’s Learning Materials: please contact your lecturer(s).
The Library is introducing a new online reading list system for the University of Lincoln. You can find out more by visiting: http://lists.library.lincoln.ac.uk/
On the other hand, if the Talis Aspire API responds that a reading list (or several) is available, the student will be presented with a link to the list(s), along with some associated information about reading lists. In the future, we may well want to expand upon this with links to tutorial/support information on finding and using resources in the Library.
Staff with a role in the Blackboard Site (“Instructor”; “Site Builder”; “Teaching Assistant”) see versions of these same screens. If there is currently no list associated with the Site, we’ll present them with information about how to get started building and populating a reading list within Aspire. Again, we hope to expand upon this in time, linking out to help materials for staff.
Finally, here’s the screen that staff with a Site role see when there are list(s) associated with the Site. It’s very similar to the student screen, except there’s a “Manage Lists” link next to each reading list – this takes them to the Talis Aspire login point (http://lncn.eu/dmz).
Many thanks to Matt Darch from ICT for putting these pages together.
