Once built, the cost of delivering this service should be relatively low. However, Digital Syllabus faces the non-trivial challenge of winning adoption by an audience primarily comprised of quick-turnaround users (undergraduate and graduate students), without a well-known brand name or reputation. To conquer this challenge, the system should be simple to use, and its purpose self-evident.
An initial payment plan might be structured in such a way as to offer schools a low-cost option, paid for either by participating departments or by the students themselves, or a free option that features targeted advertisements in the interface. This plan may need to be revisited and altered based on user feedback and adoption rates.
Digital Syllabus should support an acceptable measure of authority control when extending system access to department deans. Since Dean-level users are granted the greatest amount of user access, and can grant access to all other types of users, a Digital Syllabus staff should manage further authority control. It makes sense for this authority control to be managed using a combination of both human and automated processes. Therefore, a proper implementation of Digital Syllabus would require a small staff to cover responsibilities ranging from user relationship authentication and management to technical support to development and system maintenance to sales and administration.
As mentioned, professors typically create course syllabi by drawing upon either traditional methods (hard copy handouts) or a more modern Web-based alternative (a course website). Students invent numerous and often creative ways to manage and organize the disparate pieces of information they’re given. They may use a day planner, a wall calendar, a palm-size device, or some other tool that supports a consolidated view of all course events and deliverables. For those students who never get around to consolidating this information, the school term is a constant game of hunting, gathering and analyzing.
Included in the basic tools that ship with PalmOS software (and competitor PDA operating systems) are datebook, memo and a to-do list applications. Students who possess the right hardware and software might find these useful, although each of them almost certainly faces a substantial task in transferring the correct information from various original sources into their PDA. To make matters worse, every student must separately enter his or her own information by hand.
Handmark Software’s 4.0 Student (http://www.fourostudent.net/) offers “coursework tracking software” as a means for students to track tasks and organize data in a way that appears to address student information management problems similar to those addressed by Digital Syllabus. As with the PalmOS solution, this tool requires that each student enter information individually. The Digital Syllabus service, on the other hand, taps the power of the World Wide Web to bridge instructors (who create and broadcast information) and students (who consume information), rather than require that each student enter all of his or her data individually. In addition, when instructors implement changes to their course information, the changes are automatically updated for all subscribing students. Many instructors will come to rely on Digital Syllabus as a simple and viable alternative to maintaining a course website.
U.C. Berkeley offers students of selected courses access to CourseWeb, a Web-based application representing part of a larger eBerkeley initiative. CourseWeb, like Digital Syllabus, is designed to address the specific needs of students and instructors. It delivers a number of features such as course info, instructor info, a syllabus view, class roster, and messaging tools. However, unlike Digital Syllabus, CourseWeb displays information for each course only individually -- students can view only one course at any given time, and may never see a combined view of several course offerings. In this respect, we believe Digital Syllabus differentiates itself in a very compelling way.