Earlier this week, I mentioned that I’m fixing my syllabuses for the fall, which on my campus begins in two weeks. In comments, several people offered interesting examples of syllabus design that move beyond the basic text presentation of assignments, contact information, course calendar, and policies. And then on Twitter, Elaine Young pointed me to this infographic-styled
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Earlier this week, I mentioned that I’m fixing my syllabuses for the fall, which on my campus begins in two weeks. In comments, several people offered interesting examples of syllabus design that move beyond the basic text presentation of assignments, contact information, course calendar, and policies. And then on Twitter, Elaine Young pointed me to this infographic-styled syllabus for a course on infographics.
What I’d like to do, then, is call for other examples of visually interesting syllabuses, to be featured in an upcoming post on ProfHacker. If the syllabus lives online, you can post a link in the comments to this post; if not, feel free to e-mail me a copy. (Obviously, if you send it to me, you should expect that I will probably post it online!)
It’ll be fascinating to get fresh ideas for designing a syllabus.
Thanks for your help!
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On to this week’s links:
We’ve written a lot about accessibility and captioning on ProfHacker. This week, Maria H. Andersen (@busynessgirl) wrote a terrific post about the workload implications of mandatory captioning, and explains the concept of equivalence: Here’s where this gets interesting. If it’s non-digital material … like handwriting on a whiteboard in a live class, or audio lecture (by your mouth) in a face-to-face classroom, there is no requirement that it be made accessible unless there is student with an impairment in the class. So if you teach like we taught 100 years ago, there are no extra demands on your time. If you teach in California and make any attempt to use (gasp) digital material, you’ve just seen all your free time get sucked down a giant hole with the stamp of “mandatory accessibility.”
Michael Ullyot proposes using Twitter as a way to listen to students: Imagine that you could measure your students’ preconceptions in a more fine-grained way. You could start each class with a hands-up poll and a discussion about their questions and ideas. This is a great technique, but it has two drawbacks. Did I mention my Shakespeare class has ninety students? Getting everyone to speak would be impossible and consume most of the class time. There are in-class technological solutions like clickers, but their multiple-choice options just don’t seem nuanced enough.
Miriam K. Posner lays out the “basic things you should know about being in a Ph.D. program”: Not all grad students are like me. As I quickly learned, a lot of them know what being a grad student is all about, have done their research, and understand how to navigate academia. This post is not for them. This is about the really basic conventions and etiquette of what it means to be a Ph.D. student.
Michael Leddy explains the most basic communication of all, “How to E-mail a Student”: For every clueless student e-mailer, there’s another who has thought carefully about making a decent impression in pixels. Professors should do likewise.
Leslie Madsen-Brooks is skeptical about lecture capture technology: I do understand the utility of lecture capture. As faculty are asked to teach increasingly larger courses, lecturing seems more “natural”–because how could one have a live conversation with 200+ students? (Trust me–it can be done!) As more courses offer online sections, it’s efficient for faculty members to repurpose in-class lectures for their online students–and it ensures all students receive the same content.
In this week’s video, George R.R. Martin gives a talk at Google about A Game of Thrones: