Comic Books & Graphic Novels - Best Practices for adding to Canvas courses

[jwelchans]

Our English dept is in the process of building an online Graphic Novels course.  They have asked for assistance/ideas on getting these books housed in their Canvas course.

The books come in either .CBR or .CBZ file types

There are many mobile app options for reading/viewing these files.  And, of course, the websites where you purchase & download the content from (Comixology, in this instance) has built in online viewers.

I'm reaching out to see if anyone has helped to develop a course such as this or used any of these file types.

I'm thinking I need to determine how to either:

- embed the viewer from the Comixology site (not sure how this would work with account log-ins)

- convert the .CBR to a .PDF  (less attractive scenario due to dimished UX (so I'm told))

- find some third-party tool (open source?) where we could upload our .CBR files and post/embed them from there

- any other workable option.

Any guidance on this would be much appreciated!

[dhulsey]

This is an interesting use case,  @jwelchans ‌. What happens if you place a link in a module to each book? If it lets the student login and see the book, this might not be a bad option, but always having to login is annoying. You could also use the Redirect Tool (an LTI) to get the login screen for the comics site on the course navigation, but, again, students may have to login repeatedly:

 

If you have any programmers on staff, you could try to write a custom LTI tool that would use the information from the student's Canvas profile to log them into Comixology automatically, or you could even ask Comixology if they would be interested in developing an LTI. Since LTI is an open standard, this would likely be doable for a programmer type.  

[jwelchans]

Thanks for the reply  @dhulsey ‌!

After expanding the discussion in our English dept to include some of our meda specialists, they brought up that our media management tool, Follett Destiny, might be able to do this.  And it actually turns out that we will probably purchase & download the copies of the novels through that site and then students will be able to read them using Follett's eReader tool.  (I think we are using SingleSignOn to get students into Follett Destiny, but will have to check on that too).

I did see that there is a Follett Discovery tool listed in the EduApps area so I will have to explore that and see if it can do what we need.  Otherwise, as you mention, we might need to use the Redirect Tool to get students there.

More investigation is needed on this one but it sounds promising.  More to come.

Again - I really appreciate your response!

[dhulsey]

A preexisting tool is always nice. Let us know if the Follett tool works!