This post on the Chronicle of Higher Education came up in my LinkedIn feed today, and it is a great starting point for something that I spend too much time thinking about at this time of year – what should be on a syllabus or course outline?
The article makes a few points that I agree with, such as the need for basic information and that the course outline is intended to set the tone for the course. That said, there are also some that I don’t agree with. My main concern is that it is a mistake to worry about whether the syllabus is complete or that it explains how to be successful in a course. A course outline is not a contract, or if it is a contract, it is a very incomplete one, and that it. And incomplete contracts rely heavily on trust.
Trust is the starting point for any course worth taking. Students need to trust that I will treat them fairly when something comes up outside of our “contract” – and this becomes my goal in the first phase of the course – which includes writing a course outline, the initial set up of a Learning Management System (LMS), pre-class communication and the first class meeting. I might argue that this first phase of the course extends all the way through to the first graded assessment. If I can get to that point of the course having built some trust, then everything can get better. The main point here is that the course outline is only one part of an extended collection of information for students – delivered in the outline, in person, online and even in the form of assessment.
In this context, the tone of the course outline matters more than the content. There is information that needs to be there – my contact information, the required textbooks, course assessment details – but the most critical step is to acknowledge that not everything can be covered in a readable outline, and that this is OK. The first class then starts to fill in the gaps – the most important being that I will work to resolve any problems that arise as the course moves forward.
Hopefully this is something developing for EC310F. First class is Monday.