The Digital Syllabus project’s primary objective is to address problems that are common to students who juggle several courses at once, and instructors who must manage syllabus updates and broadcasts in a timely and consistent fashion.
The focus of this tool is the course syllabus -- the “backbone” of any class. A syllabus provides essential facts such as section meeting schedules, topics to be covered, related learning resources, assignments and important milestones, as well as other useful information. A very detailed syllabus might additionally offer instructor team profiles and contact information, descriptions or summaries of topical coverage, brief announcements, and more. In short, the syllabus is a course resource that students and instructors find equally useful to reference on regular occasion throughout the term.
In today’s academic environment (particularly in higher education),
it is common for students who take several classes in a given term to receive
a collection of course syllabi. Instructors typically distribute a syllabus
at the very beginning of the term, either in a static hard-copy form (hand-written
changes to be noted by each student individually) or published as part of
a course website (presumably, updated as necessary). In both cases, students
must hunt down, sift through and disambiguate data from a variety of sources,
each reflecting the idiosyncratic styles and conventions of each instructor.
For example,
some instructors associate a set of readings with a particular day as a way
of indicating what students should have read (and be prepared to discuss)
by that date; others use identical notation to indicate what is assigned as
of that date for discussion in the following class meeting. Additionally,
there is wide margin for design-related confusion stemming from variations
in how instructors organize and present syllabus information. Add to this
the quirks of website navigation rules, which can vary significantly from
one site to the next.
Subsequently, when students have seemingly trivial questions about their course schedules and workload -- such as: “what are my readings for this week?” or “when are my classes today and what will be due in each of them?” or “What assignments do I need to have completed by next Tuesday?” or even “what will my finals schedule look like?” -- it can be a time-consuming and confusing exercise to gather and analyze the various data required to form answers. A student might view fragments of each syllabus side-by-side or hand-copy them into a calendaring program.
Digital Syllabus facilitates the process for students by
;)
collecting and standardizing course information into a single tool for quick
and easy access.
Benefits of Digital Syllabus extend to instructors as well. At a time when students are becoming increasingly accustomed to digital delivery of syllabus information, those instructors find the currently available tools (static paper and custom-created HTML pages) difficult and inflexible.