Week 5 – Creating an Effective Online Syllabus
Friday, October 12th, 2012
Creating an Effective Online Syllabus
A good syllabus was always for me an essential part of planning my classes. My department gives us a well-designed syllabus that we must follow. There is little room for changes; however, I add my own projects and grading criteria and calendar. Looking at Ko & Rossen’s checklist looks like the department got it all! For an online class all it needs is to have more links and technical support and explanations. I really like Pilar’s idea of posting Wimba Voice Authoring giving them a little explanation of every project. That is something that I will definitely have.
With my 25 years of experience I can say that writing the syllabus is not the most important part of the course. The most important part is for them to read it and understand it! Every semester I get over and over emails asking questions which answers are very clear in the syllabus. This semester, I decided to try something different, it looks like it worked! (I did not receive any questions yet). I published my syllabus and calendar in two public Google Docs (or Drive now). I posted the PDFs in Blackboard but I did not print 70 copies of the 5 pages documents. Instead, I printed a few documents with the link (shorted by tiny.cc) and the QR code. I passed the pages around and I made students with smart phone to save the website in their phones. That way, that did not have the excuse that they could not get to Bb. The rest of the students had to write the tiny url on their agendas or notebooks. Less than half of the class had smart phones or new how to scan a QR code. Nevertheless, they appreciated and liked this format. I also made a required test on blackboard with 10 questions about the syllabus.
I feel like every week I am more and more enthusiastic about the idea of teaching online!