Comments on: Online Syllabi

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 23 May 2006 11:39:02 +0000

Yeah, I think about that a lot–it’s sort of the underlying premise of my “Gordian Knot” posts: where’s the pressure point for change?

And you’re right that it’s not only not easy to pressure people to change, but that you have to show a bit of caution when you’re basically asking people to take on a new regular bit of work. There are a lot of people looking to hang bells and whistles on a semester’s labor schedule, and faculty rightfully resist most of them because many such requests take little interest in the labor time required. (I received about eight surveys this year of various kinds, for example.)

By: The Constructivist

The Constructivist — Tue, 23 May 2006 06:24:31 +0000

I've posted every syllabus I've ever put together and will continue to do so even as I switch to using Blackboard and soon Angel for intra-class communications. I think there's a simple answer why more professors don't do this: the difficulty of creating and maintaining a web site, or at least its perceived difficulty, for many in the professoriate. I used to think this was a generational thing until I realized how few of my generation post their syllabi at my own institution. My union goon side sees it as a kind of unofficial academic work-to-rule practice, but my activist techie side sees it as self-defeating spitefulness. So here's the problem with your suggestion at the end, Tim. Any university that tries to institute it will try either a) forming a team of IT people to work with individual faculty members and literally go office to office, in which case the team will keep growing and faculty will (rightly?) complain about university resources being shifted toward staff and away from faculty OR b) forming a team of IT people or hiring a consultant to create an idiot-proof syllabus-into-web-site-web-site that faculty won't use (goto a). My current institution is pursuing a) minus the team and the going office to office parts, with foreseeable results. My graduate institution hired my ex to do b) in the mid-'90s and it was a great way to support a great graduate student but I sincerely doubt the template she created is still being used (I know the one I had to use for my first two online syllabi ever--and my first two course designs ever!--bit the dust within years and was retired a decade later for even archiving purposes, taking my syllabi with it). Any other tactics at the institutional level that have a prayer of actually working? Even neat online projects like the American Studies Crossroads Project that go the "professional" norming route rather than the "institutional" one aren't meeting their potential, IMHO. Paradoxically, then, I think the best route is a combination of the exhortation and example blogs like yours and Mode for Caleb provide (sticking to historians' ones I read regularly). But this raises the larger question of how/why professional/institutional norms change...want to take that topic on sometime?

By: texter

texter — Wed, 17 May 2006 19:54:45 +0000

This is a great topic. I need to read the post more carefully – and perhaps the original ACTA site – but based on what I already know, I absolutely agree that syllabi should be made available. My institution uses Segue, and I was kind of shocked to see that some professors who used Segue (still a minority i think) configured the “permissions” so that only those registered for their class had access to things like the syllabus! I thought they would at least let other university faculty see what they were up to in the interest of dissemination of information, inter-disciplinary collaboration and plain ol’ sharing.
To be somewhat self-critical for a moment, I noticed I was hesitant to ask a faculty member in my graduate program for a copy of her syllabus for a course I could not take. She was happy to oblige, but I noticed myself wondering if I was overstepping some “intellectual property” line with regards to “seeing” the syllabus without registering for the course! I mean, are syllabi even considered intellectual property?
Anyway, I love seeing how other professors juxtapose texts and organize material; and I love to share my own course ideas and syllabi. Depending on what type of course it is, and how much value one puts on interdisciplinarity, creating syllabi can be labor-intensive but that’s what makes that work so satisfying as well. It is part of the intellectual work we are engaged in as scholars.