We have also had this function requested by our academics, mainly for the purpose of hiding topics they are not covering this year but may use in the future. Some have also mentioned being able to gradually release a list

I just wanted to add that I have had this request from a few academics. Being able to make only certain sections of the list visible would really help in how they use the list.
"Publishing sections would be a useful function particularly to allow finessing of the later semester readings. I know some of my colleagues here in Public Health and Tropical Medicine were also interested to hear if that functionality existed.
Thank you for the link to insert sections into LearnJCU I will continue to use that."

A comment from one of our academics at the University of Liverpool about why it would be useful to be able to hide a section of a list -

They aren't covering some topics this year, but will be doing so next year, so wondered if they could hide bits of their reading list this academic year and reincorporate them next year.

We would find this extremely useful when adding sections to lists for copyright compliance. Often these are materials that we want to report to our licence authority but they are not needed for teaching or academics don't want these to be visible to students. The ability to add these to a section that could then be hidden would be an advantage.

Feedback from one of our academics on this:

"One thing that I do find very difficult with the reading list system is that it is hard to incrementally release readings. My preference would be to be able to create a list at the beginning of semester and then release sections every week. When I have released an entire list, students have either been put off by the size of it, or attempted to read too far ahead which has led to confusion."

(This academic does not use a VLE for his module, so embedding a section of a list isn't an option for him.)

This would be very useful, as would the ability to copy single sections from one list to another. I would like to publish the week by week readings, but hide the essay list for now, since this is being amended.

This would be useful to us, as it has been directly requested by a number of members of academic staff. A "phased rollout" approach to reading lists seems to be favoured by some schools.

We would like Talis to revisit this for several reasons:

- Our institution uses 2 VLEs, one of which is an in-house system which does not support embedding of sections of a list.
- For our other VLE (Moodle), very few academics have opted to embed sections of lists - in the vast majority of cases they've opted for a simple link to a complete list.
- Students come to resource lists from a variety of routes, not just Moodle (e.g. via a Google search).

As with previous comments, this is something our academics have asked for consistently, e.g. one academic who likes to alternate readings from year to year; others that want to update lists as they go; team-taught modules where some academics have updated their section of the list, but others have not yet done so; etc. As hiding sections of pages (e.g. in Moodle) is common practice for many academics they are surprised when the same functionality is not available in resource lists.

Re. resource lists updated by Library staff: for long lists received late in the day from academics, very often we only have time to update the early sections of a list - we publish this and come back to complete the list when time allows. At present we need to add a note such as "Later weeks still to be updated" which isn't very satisfactory as students don't always see this. It would help a lot if we could simply hide the sections still to be worked on instead.

This isn't a very logical response. If you have timed release of sections in your Learning Management System but a fully published list in Aspire, then your lists *will* be out of sync - there's nothing you can do to prevent it.

If you add a 'hide section' option into Aspire which is respected by the LTI tools, then only visible sections in Aspire will be visible in your LMS, so both systems will always be in sync.

This functionality is something our academics have also asked for, for many years.

That's really disappointing to hear. Here at Monash University we have a Reading & Reserve team who create lists for Academics and the ability to hide a section or a couple of bookmarks would be hugely beneficial.
We are often asked to roll over a list from a previous year however want to review the content so ask for only a certain portion published. It is a lot more work for us to delete the bookmarks and re-do them again. As no two people work on the list in consecutive years on occasion having them in our bookmarks list is not always an option.

Having a section we could tick 'Hide' and move all items we want unpublished would be an outstanding option that we have craved for...

We would very, very much like this as our lecturers often want to release readings as they go. Agree with Brighton.

this is something our lecturers have asked for, they specifically don't want people reading ahead and want them to focus on one week's reading at a time

I review/re-use sections within my reading lists from year to year and sometimes need to 'park' a segment within the course for a year or two. I'd like the feature to be able to hide sections within a reading list so that I can re-use them in future years without them being visible in the current year

We would definitely like the ability to show/hide and time release items on a list.
While the LTI developments for VLEs could help in this regard it won't meet the needs of many of our academic staff nor will it meet students' needs.
One of the drivers for adopting TA was because it enabled academic staff to bring together resources they were recommending to students all in one place. Finding recommended stuff located in different locations throught a VLE has been a complaint of students. While you would, as an acamdmic, be able to time release sections of a reading list for teaching purposes you would still want to have a complete list located somewhere in the VLE module so students had a central source and would want control over the release. Angie

Keji, can we have an update on this? It says planned as of dec 2012, but is it still in the pipeline? If not, we'd want to revive the idea on the 2014 forum. Claire

This is a great idea because it means you have the option to publish the archived reading lists sooner. For example publish weeks 1 to 6 and hide weeks 7-12 while you update them.

I missed the voting too but think this is a very important development, especially when using this tool from year to year

This is something several academics at Sheffield Hallam have asked for. Angie

Although I think this is a good idea, our experience is that students like to read ahead and actually kick up if they cannot see their lists before the beginning of semester.

has there been any recent development of this functionality? At BU we are very interested in adaptive release. I have not added a vote as the tag suggests it is already planned.