Center for Innovations in Technology for Learning
 
 
projects>putting a syllabus online
     
 
Developing an online syllabus:
The trick to a good on-line syllabus is to identify the important categories of information that form the basis of your syllabus. For example, the following topics are usually covered in a syllabus:
  • Course Goals and objectives
  • Policies: Grading, Attendance, late work
  • Grading scales
  • Readings
  • Assignments
  • Week to week class events
  • Projects
You may have other topics depending on your discipline and the nature of your class.
Other things to consider:

Will students be expected to regularly consult your online syllabus to find out new or changing information? If so, you may want to include an Announcements section.

Will students need to download documents? If so, you may want to include a Document section. As well, you should think about standardizing on a common software application to insure students can reliably access your material.

Regarding the design and layout, we suggest that you avoid posting a syllabus that requires extensive scrolling through text. It is extremely uncomfortable to read a lot of text from a computer screen. Break up your content into smaller chunks and use a few graphics and colors to reduce the monotony of text.

Finally, remember that posting your syllabus online merely has informational value. It does not necessarily have instructional value.

You can post your online syllabus to either your OAK account,or you may request server space on the CITL server.

Here is an example of an online syllabus, designed by OU's senior web designer, Tracy Corrigan.

Below we've provided two types of templates that allow you to use this design. One set is in an HTML format. Depending upon how you write your HTML tags, you will likely need to delete links that are not relevant to your needs, or to change the link names. The other set of templates is provided in a MS Word 98 document format. Items that you need to modify are indicated in blue and located within [brackets]. Comments provided for your information are indicated in green and located within.

Don't forget that if you use the MS Word document files, you must save them as HTML files to display them in a browser.

As well, you may wish to give a template file a new file name depending upon the modifications you make to any hyperlinks. For example, if you wish to change the link "Course Activities" to "Course Research Topics" you must make the modification in three steps:

  1. Change the link text in the index.html file to the new category choice that you wish students to see via the web browser (i.e. Course Activities becomes Course Research Topics).

  2. Save the activites.html file with a new name, such as topic.html. This is the file an individual will link to when the click on the hyperlink Topics.html.

  3. Change the html tags in the index.html file so that the newly named link references the new file, topics.html

The index.html file is your starting point.

MS Word 98 document files HTML files
Index.doc Index.html
Site.doc Site.html
Activities.doc Activities.html
Protocols.doc Protocols.html
Readings.doc Readings.html
Policies.doc Policies.html
Due.doc Due.html

 

 


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