Helping Students Slide Through your Syllabus

By: Matt Schumann (Department of History and Philosophy) on November 7th, 2022

Its rationale, format, and content have long been well-established:

• Basic information, like course title, CRN, section number, and instructor name, office, office hours, and contact information.

• Policies and guidelines, such as for attendance, late work, and academic honesty

• Grades and grade scales

• Schedule of topics, course readings, and graded assignments

• Helpful contacts for things like disability accommodations and subject tutoring

All of these appeared—and frequently continue to appear—in a word-processed document, black-on-white, neatly and professionally formatted with echoes of a legal contract. We have all seen them, used them, and if we stretch our memories back to when we were students, we might also recall looking at the wall of text, not really appreciating what the syllabus-as-contract really meant, not reading very fully after the first day of class, and, quite possibly, neither holding onto our hard copies nor recalling much of their contents.

Canvas and other learning management systems have lended a helpful hand by letting faculty build their courses first, and then writing the schedule of teaching and assignments backwards into a part of the course shell labelled “Syllabus”. So far as faculty can develop their courses before a given semester, this page is useful within its scope, but rather less with things like classroom ethos, course policies, helpful contacts, or a student bill of rights.

What remains, then, is still the plain, black-on-white, word-processed contract-style wall of text that we know and love because it’s more-or-less familiar, and that students today likely find even less memorable and compelling than the ones we knew and Cham parodied.

What differs, however, is that we are no longer in the analog universe of hard-copy syllabi, nor even—thanks to developments like socio-emotional learning, or the much older faith-and-learning integration in religious schools—in the space of relating with our students merely or even primarily by contract. Inspirations vary significantly, from drives for equity and inclusion to more general student-centered teaching and learning design; but higher education is nonetheless moving—quickly and decidedly—toward a more humanistic vision of the instructor-student relationship.

Many syllabi now contain a student bill of rights. Many syllabi now refer students to more support resources. Whether or not our syllabi share them by name, we now have Starfish and other technologies that help us check in on students’ performance—at least—if not on their well-being. Mindfulness has emerged as a notable pedagogical practice, as have games and gamification, and ever more emphasis on learning with visuals and animations.

So what if, instead of welcoming students into a contractual space, we welcomed them into a community of learning? What if, instead of black-on-white, we presented our courses in full, living color? What if we made syllabi look less like contracts, and more like brochures?

If these ideas sound appealing, then the answer is closer than we might think: still within the Office and Google suites, just migrating from Word and Docs to PowerPoint and Slides. Content can even remain largely consistent, but now with a lot more aesthetic options.

Especially for our increasing number of online learning spaces, faculty may do well to include their pictures on their syllabi. As we emerge from COVID circumstances that, for some of us, allowed students to peer into our home offices, kitchens, basements, in some cases our children’s play spaces, we can even use syllabi to introduce more of our lives beyond the academy.

Within both PowerPoint and Slides, tools exist to organize our space much differently and more effectively than Word and Docs. It is easier to set key content in boxes with highlights or other colors, and to add a variety of color to the syllabus, just generally. Moreover, while search functions can help students navigate a word-processed syllabus, PowerPoint and Slides both have handy toolbars for navigating slide by slide, and slides with sufficiently easy navigation markers—in much larger print than is appropriate for word processed documents—remain highly navigable in Acrobat and other pdf readers.

Beyond using the word-processing medium to describe and extol syllabi by slides, perhaps the best that this blog post can offer is a few examples, a basic template, and some additional resources.

• An early model of HIST 109 (first half of World), from Fall 2020;

• An early model of HIST 124 (second half of U.S.), from Fall 2020;

• A later version for an introduction to International Studies at Bowling Green;

• A very basic syllabus template in Google Slides, with a focus on what goes where.

For templates that earn more style points from the start, here are two google searches:

• Syllabus brochure template

• PowerPoint syllabus template

I invite readers and viewers to note not only the differences of aesthetics and navigation in syllabi-by-slides, but also, crucially, similarities of content. For as much as a slide-through syllabus presents content in a new way, there is plenty from the word-processed version to simply copy-and-paste.

A final note as I continue to mature in my own syllabus-building: all the information for my courses still resides in the syllabus—my medium has changed, but the bulk of my content remains the same. Carrying forward the example that others have set for me in their word-processed syllabi, perhaps it’s time that I set Cham’s classic comic strip on its own slide.