Comments on: Pictures From an Institution 6 (Course Design)

By: Sarah

Sarah — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 22:53:02 +0000

This is not the point of the blogpost, but seeing the Colonial Encounters syllabus brings back so many memories – mostly good ones of class and reading and writing, but also of being yelled at in my honors exam because I used the word ‘hysterical.’

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:21:42 +0000

Yeah, I wonder also at data both from ITS and our AAs about when faculty get “real” about updating work, say, in terms of making scans of new readings.

Moodle is more different than I thought it would be. I was already used to it as a way to coordinate shared documents in committees but the course management setup takes some getting used to.

I wonder if there’s actually any studies out there of syllabus formatting, and how faculty handle complicated syllabi of various types.

By: Colin Purrington

Colin Purrington — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:01:11 +0000

Starting the last week in July sounds about right, but I wonder how many faculty give themselves enough time for this task. Certainly changing CMS requires at least a month, but for a normal summer, I think that month is needed for the complete revisions in design and content that so often happen. Waiting until the last weeks of August just ensures that faculty are going to just reuse something from past years. (Of course, that past stuff is brilliant.) Anyway, enjoyed reading about your strategy above, and was wondering whether ITS had stats about when faculty make first edit for new school year. Even if collected without names it would be a fascinating dataset.

As a technical aside, isn’t Moodle different!? I’ve really enjoyed the switch, but some of that is just enjoying the nudge to redo. The lack of folders really increases the transparency of one’s syllabi, I think, and that’s a good thing. But on a down note, it takes much, much longer to engage in massive reorganizations of complicated syllabi.