Prof. Amy Cavender at Saint Mary’s College designed her syllabus online as a WordPress site.
A recent post by Amy Cavender on The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s ProfHacker blog explores the possibilities afforded by a syllabus that is fully online—as a web page that you can update during the semester without having to re-print the syllabus for your students.
The post follows a sequence of previous articles on ProfHacker showcasing innovative approaches to syllabi. For example, a 2011 article on Creative Approaches to The Syllabus gathered several contributed syllabi from professors along with their commentary on design decisions. The article proved so popular that in 2012 a follow-up article featured several more examples. Inspired by that series, earlier this summer, Travis Grandy and Hari Stephen Kumar at the Instructional Media Lab facilitated a well-attended summer workshop series on radically rethinking syllabus design. Travis has extensively redesigned his College Writing syllabi as informative brochures, and Hari applied these design principles to create a fully web-based syllabus for his Summer 2013 online course as well as a PDF brochure for his Fall 2013 seminar. This latest article on web syllabi thus continues our conversation on making syllabi more interactive and useful for teachers and students alike.
Check out the article here: Why Use an Online Syllabus, by Amy Cavender, ProfHacker, September 16, 2013.
And here is Prof. Cavender’s own Fall 2013 online syllabus at Saint Mary’s College: POSCI151W – Political Issues.