Inspired by a recent blog post on ProfHacker about creative approaches to the syllabus, this semester I’m trying out something with my course syllabus: instead of handing out copies of the syllabus in class on the first day and then reading through it, I shared it online through Google Docs with my students and asked them to post comments/questions/suggestions on the document itself. I made it an optional and ungraded assignment for the first week of class, due by the second class meeting. I set aside a limited amount of time on the second day of class to briefly discuss the major questions that they would post. Read on for more…
Here is a screenshot of the Google Docs syllabus (click on it for a quick clearer view):
By doing this, I was hoping to avoid spending way too much class time covering tedious details on the syllabus and instead dive right into key learning activities. Reading the syllabus online thus became one of our first learning activities — but the objective of the learning activity was not so much mastery of the syllabus, but rather introducing students to the act of collaborating and providing feedback on a document online. Since we will be doing peer feedback through cloud-based tools online throughout the semester (e.g. through wikis, shared documents, Microsoft Word’s change tracking, etc), this learning activity gets them familiar with the interface for a typical cloud platform (Google in this case).
The results so far have been exciting, way beyond what I had hoped! Not only did most of my students post a comment or question (26 out of 30 students did so), but ALL of them posted something useful, pertinent, relevant, and focused. Although the requirement was only that they post one comment, many of them posted multiple times, sometimes adding on to another student’s comment. Many of the comments were of a clarifying nature: “will we be graded as a team or individually?”, for example, on a part of the syllabus that described how students would be working in groups for some writing assignments. Some of them were also more in-depth. Here is an example: (click for a larger view)
I’m excited about this mainly because I feel like this displaces the syllabus from being a produced artifact that students are expected to passively consume — like “Terms and Conditions” agreements — and instead makes this a living document that students can respond back to and interact with. It’s still MY syllabus, i.e. I don’t think students are under any illusion that they can radically change the structure of the course itself, but I’m hoping that this act at least makes them feel like they ought to be able to respond back to any document they are given. That would be cool, no? Oh well, at least this is my current level of excitement on this after the first week of classes — I will post updates during the semester as to how this actually works itself out.
The syllabus is also automatically published online as a webpage — any changes made to the Google Docs syllabus automatically shows up on the webpage, but without the comments. We will likely be tweaking the syllabus throughout the semester, and you can see the live syllabus here: http://www.bit.ly/cw112-fall2011-syllabus
(Hat tip to Prof. Marla Miller at the UMass History Department, who showed me her ProfHacker-inspired brochure-like syllabus and pointed me toward the ProfHacker blog post on creative syllabi.)