The open-door syllabus

A couple of weeks ago, my CFI colleague Ed Brantmeier and I ran two workshops about the Inclusive Courses review tool that we’ve been working on with Carl Moore, who currently runs the Research Academy for Integrated Learning at UDC. I am calling the survey or whatever it is a “review tool” because we are not sure what it is: partly reflective writing prompts, partly standardized survey, partly rubric. I suspect we’ll develop it in a couple of different directions. Feedback appreciated! (You can get a copy on Academia.edu or by emailing me at my broschax gmail.)

But that’s not the point here. My point is about syllabi. For our workshops, we had focussed on a subset of questions in our tool that dealt with the course syllabus, and in preparation, I looked at a bunch of syllabi that I could find online.

Shout-out to all those who post their course syllabi online: Much appreciated! It’s really instructive and humbling to read the syllabi that people write – so much good work out there.

What struck me was that many syllabi read like rulebooks, long lists of instructions and prohibitions that start right on the first page: attendance policies, deadlines, points subtracted for late submissions, margins and font requirements for papers, and and and. Sometimes it seemed that the professor had added another rule whenever there was trouble with something students did the previous semester. (Someone submitted a paper in 28pt font to meet the page requirement? I’ll put a font requirement on the syllabus!). Sometimes it simply looked like students were sinners in the hands of a wrathful professor.

What type of documents are such syllabi? Rulebooks (in fact, some approach booklet length, so rule booklet would be the right term). A code the professor can point to if a student complains about a grade, wants an extension, a makeup exam, or the like. Maybe a contract in which a professor tells the students what they’ll get from the class and what they’ll have to do to get it.

I want my syllabi to be open doors instead of rulebooks or contracts.

I’ve written about the idea of syllabi as invitations before – the idea, espoused by Ken Bain and others, that syllabi should be similar to, say, an invitation for dinner: friendly, persuasive, respectful, and respecting the students’ autonomy in deciding whether or not to accept the invitation. That approach is important to me. My syllabus emphasizes the central questions and topics that the class will address, the things that the class will do, and the things that I promise to teach the student. I also provide a section with suggestions for how students can be successful. Rules are also included – our accrediting body has a number of things that have to be included in any syllabus – and they can be found in an FAQ section.

A syllabus as an open door is not only about the inviting or the promising syllabus, it is also about imagery. I want the syllabus to look like something that you (OK, maybe just I) want to take into my hand and browse through. I want images that tell me something about the class, about connections to life outside of class, and that set a mood. There are a number of people out there in academia who create really appealing, and some really out-there, syllabi in that respect. Take a look at Chris Clark’s blog post on visual syllabi and at Lynda Barry’s hand-drawn syllabi.

Much of the stuff that Chris Clark links to is completely beyond my skill set (as are Lynda Barry’s drawings), but (1) I want to have some fun, and (2) even with limited skills, and access to Microsoft Publisher, I was able to make my syllabus look better than, say, a term paper. So here is an example from one of my classes. 

One difficulty that I encountered, though, is accessibility. (Quite a nasty paradox: the open-door syllabus that is not accessible. Gah!) Microsoft Publisher makes it very difficult to create accessible documents. The menu items that let you assign headings is not by default part of the command ribbons. As Greg Kraus explains, the sequence in which a screen reader reads a Publisher document depends on when the different items were created – older items come first. I won’t bore you with further details, but it took me a few hours to find out that I wasn’t able to produce a pdf that Acrobat would read back to me in the right sequence. (Try it with the pdf up there!) Yes, part of this might be my understanding of tagging in Acrobat, but I did not have time to properly learn it. 

One solution to this problem would be to provide two versions of the syllabus: the magazine-style version and a version that contains the syllabus text in a straightforward manner. Students can download and use whichever version they prefer. The text-focused version can be created along with the “visual” syllabus, basically as a script, and should be optimized for screen readers. This means a proper hierarchy of headings, but also translation of graphics into words that make sense when read aloud. For example, I found that the graphical presentation of the grading scale did not make much sense when voiced by Acrobat: the audio would transform “C-“ into “C”, skipping the “minus”, and the like. You can also provide the text-focussed syllabus in MS Word format, so that students who do not use a screen reader but prefer larger print can reformat the syllabus to their liking. Here is my text-focused version of the syllabus (.docx). 

This solution raises new questions, though: Is the syllabus text optimized for presentation alongside graphs, photos, and the like? If it is, is an important element missing from the text-focussed syllabus that should be replaced by elements that are more expressive in a textual medium. For example, should the text-focussed syllabus include unique story-telling elements that serve some of the functions that images play in the other syllabus? But if we do so, don’t we use decidedly non-universal design?