While our databases generally permit uploading content to your classroom -- and while this does save your students the extra step of logging in to the databases -- we actually recommend linking to the article.
Consider this: if you download an article for your class, you're 1 user. If all your students read the article in D2L, our statistics still show... only 1 user. Sooner or later we have to decide whether to renew a database subscription, and that's going to look like a very unused resource! Whereas if you direct all your students to the article in situ, they're all contributing to the traffic for that database.
Caution! Be sure you're linking with the permalink or stable url, especially in EBSCOhost databases. If you copy the link from your browser like you would for a website, it has good odds of breaking, because those are temporary.
Exception: book chapters, depending on the user licensing. If you...
- only need your students to look at one chapter,
- and the chapter length fits into the allowed number of pages you can save,
- and the book doesn't have unlimited licenses...
... then it's better to download the chapter you need to place in D2L. Otherwise, your students will "bump into" each other trying to use the link, blocking each other from accessing the text. Our Faculty Guide pages on the e-book collections show how to check the available licenses for books.
