one thing that occurred to me looking at your diagram is that you could have one pinned topic with two posts in it, then lock the topic so nobody adds to them. Then you’d only have half the number of extra topics! The first post could be the syllabus and the second the readings. Depending on how long these are you could either link out or use the nifty text hide/show feature to keep these posts from getting too long.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/collapsing-text-box/14144/5?u=tobiaseigen