In 2024, University of Central Florida Librarians teamed with Instructional Designers to deploy Leganto into Canvas to enhance access to library resources for online learners. To gain faculty buy-in and acceptance of the new product, we designed strategies to promote engaging the library collections inside of Canvas.

The University of Central Florida resides in Orlando, Florida. The University has over 69,000 students, 1,930 faculty, and 790 adjunct faculty members. It has over 13 campuses throughout central Florida. The University offers “104 bachelor's, 97 masters’, 33 research doctorates, 3 professional doctorates and 3 specialist degree programs.”i Classes are presented in-person, online, or mixed mode. During the Spring 2024, there were 7,800 course sections. Of these, 1,494 were web-based courses with over 40,000 students taking at least one online course. In January 2024, University of Central Florida (UCF) librarians and instructional designers began onboarding Leganto, a course reading list module, with the plan to pilot embedding it inside of Canvas for summer classes. Leganto, a component of UCF’s integrated library system, Alma/Primo, a product of ExLibris, is a resource management tool that enables instructors to add library lists such as books and ebooks, articles, open access materials, and videos to ultimately create a reading list in Canvas for students to access. Leganto has currently been adopted by over 450 libraries around the world. Leganto provides opportunities to facilitate student engagement in online courses, connect faculty with insight on analytics that can offer insight on student success online, and enhance accessibility by making it easy for librarians to work with faculty to connect library sourced materials directly into the classroom. Instructional Designers connect librarians to the Canvas courses. Before implementing Leganto, the only way for UCF Libraries to provide access to print items was by placing the physical copy on reserve at the main library, John C. Hitt Library, or three branch campuses. Students, regardless of the class mode, were forced to go into the library to access the resources, posing a barrier for online learners. Leganto makes digitization of print sources possible through controlled digital lending. This contributes to the equitable availability of these sources for students in any location. At UCF’s Center for Distributed Learning (CDL), a team of instructional designers provide pedagogical support to faculty for their online and mixed-mode courses, hosted in Canvas. Instructional designers offer pedagogical consultations, quality and high-quality course reviews, promote open educational resources and practices, and build collaborative relationships with faculty, departments, and other CDL teams with emphasis on pedagogy and online course quality. The premise of utilizing Leganto at the University of Central Florida is three-fold. First, integrating Leganto inside of Canvas would allow students one stop shopping for access to the required and optional reading materials. Second, librarians can work with faculty to provide affordable textbooks and to find readings, access to videos, etc. that are accessible through the library and adhere to copyright laws. Third, Leganto provides analytics for both faculty and librarians. Faculty can see what is being used or not used. Leganto will send a report to the librarians and staff regarding bad links to journals, websites, etc. Librarians can work to resolve the issue and notify the class of the resolution. There were ten online undergraduate and graduate courses that piloted Leganto during the summer, including Nursing, History, Political Science, and Public Administration. The average size of these classes was about forty students. The librarians asked faculty to supply them with the reading lists and input the citations into Leganto. The graduate classes had between 5 to 350 citations per class, while undergraduate classes ranged between 1 to 250 citations per class. Now that the pilot has successfully launched, the next steps were to expand the technology to include more online courses. Both the Instructional Designers and the Librarians needed to come at this from different viewpoints to promote Leganto to the larger faculty audience. Below is a combined list of different ways that the team chose to reach out to faculty: 1. Outreach to instructional designers. At UCF, all faculty who teach online or mixed-mode courses are paired with an instructional designer, who fosters a collaborative relationship with their faculty. By increasing their familiarity with Leganto, instructional designers can recognize when Leganto is a good fit for a course and recommend it to their faculty 2. Integration into faculty professional development. Before they can design online or mixed-mode courses, faculty must complete a professional development course. By including information about Leganto in this course, all faculty who are new to teaching online at UCF will hear about it. 3. Presenting at campus events. Presenting about Leganto to faculty audiences at various campus workshops and events helped expand our outreach. 4. Canvas placement. Strategic placement of a Leganto link in the default course menu in Canvas may help increase faculty awareness. 5. Canvas search. Collaborating UCF developers creating an in-house search function for Canvas to access data on citations and reading lists. 6. Collaborating with UCF’s Virtual Labs and Simulations Work Group to promote Leganto in tandem with JOVE subscription. 7. The Learning Resource Librarian reached out to faculty through introductions from the librarian subject liaisons. 8. Analyzed the bookstore spreadsheets. The bookstore provides the library each semester with a file of textbooks that are being used each semester by our faculty. Using that list, create Leganto profiles for books that have been identified as ebooks in the library, and coordinating with the instructional designers to push the Leganto into their Canvas Courses. Follow up with emails, phone calls, and appointments to make faculty aware of what we have done and ask for complete reading lists to further enhance the reading lists. 9. Using that same bookstore list, identify UCF library owned books that are in print. Verify that the title is not available in any electronic format, and following copyright guidelines, allow for controlled digital lending within the confines of Leganto. Coordinate with the Reserve staff to remove the print book from the circulation while there is an electronic copy circulating. Further coordination with the instructional designers to push those titles into Leganto via Canvas. Follow up with emails, phone calls, and appointments to make faculty aware of what we have done. Further ask faculty to supply the Learning Resource Librarian with their syllabus/course reading lists to expand what is being offered in Leganto. 10. Using Interlibrary Loan analysis and connections, identified articles and book titles that were being repeatedly requested through interlibrary loan (ILL). Investigated through course schedules, and process of elimination, who is teaching the course and inquired with faculty about their textbooks and how the library could support their students. 11. Partnering with the library's Acquisitions and Collection Development team. Run the Bookstore list of textbooks against Rialto and coordinate efforts with the Textbook Affordability Librarian and subject librarians to see what can be purchased. 12. Review the print reserve collections at the John C. Hitt library and 3 branch campuses. Identify which titles are only available in print, communicate with the faculty members to discuss shifting electronic versions of the books. 13. Identify which Canvas courses are being taught using blueprint software and reach out to the faculty coordinators.