Designing an Effective Online Syllabus
A workshop presented 3/4/99 by Sabrina DeTurk

Co-sponsored by the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable
and the Teaching and Learning Center

Workshop Goals

• The purpose of this session is NOT to teach you the bells and whistles of website design (though you will get to make at least one web page).   For additional TLTR-sponsored sessions which can teach you more about creating and uploading your pages, check the workshop schedule.
• The session IS designed to get you to think about why you might want to put a syllabus online and what will make your students want to use it.

My own philosophy is that the online syllabus has to offer something that a paper version can't; for me, that something is flexibility and interactivity.

What do we typically include in our syllabi?

• department and course number
• professor's name and contact info
• course description
• course expectations/requirements
• policies (attendance, academic dishonesty, etc.)
• textbook(s)/other required readings
• schedule/assignments

How can an online syllabus help add interactivity to the above?

• link to department homepage
• email link directly to you
• links to related sites within course description
• links to prerequisite courses, if applicable
• links to amazon.com or Barnes & Noble for book purchases
• links to readings available online
• links to assignments (students can print them out on their own)

Of course, the web also provides a myriad of opportunities for creating more interactivity within your course (beyond the syllabus) - discussion groups, online quizzes, web assignments, and so on.  These are just some ideas to get you started with the first part of a course that is likely to appear online.

Samples

• this is a barebones example of how you can easily create most of the elements listed above, simply by converting some existing Word documents to HTML and making links
• here is my syllabus from my DART 170 (Introduction to Digital Arts and Multimedia Design) course; in this course, students expect the syllabus to grow and change throughout the semester (for example, readings have been rearranged, web assignments are added bit by bit, and so on)
• you can find other examples of online syllabi and course content (sorted by discipline) at the World Lecture Hall site; some of these get quite sophisticated
• my students in DART 170 helped compile this list of interesting education-related sites - while most of them aren't syllabi, they may give you some ideas for sites to link to
• here are some basic instructions for using Microsoft Word to create web pages