VU Faculty Test-drive Simple Syllabus

By Cynthia Rutz, Director, Valparaiso Institute for Teaching and Learning (CITAL)

This summer several VU faculty piloted Simple Syllabus, a new tool that ensures students can, with a single click, get to the most important parts of your syllabus. In this article two faculty–Theresa Carroll (CONHP) and David Rolling (Kinesiology)– talk about their successes and challenges with Simple Syllabus. Note that the provost has said “Faculty are encouraged to use this tool for all classes at Valpo this year. Starting in fall 2023, we will begin collecting all syllabi across campus each semester using the Simple Syllabus format for our HLC accreditation.” So read on to learn more about how your colleagues adjusted to this new tool.

Theresa Carroll, CONHP

Theresa is new to VU, having started in February. Information about Simple Syllabus was shared at a CONHP meeting by Mike Tyler, Associate Provost of Graduate and Online Education. Then Theresa signed up for a Simple Syllabus training session with instructional designer Gina Rue. That led to her volunteering to pilot it. Her syllabus was fairly short, so it was easy to put her basic information in Simple Syllabus.

Theresa likes how all the campus information and policies–Honor Council, AARC, Title IX, etc.–were already in the template. This meant she did not need to check the AARC or Title IX website to see about updates. Moreover, any future updates to those university policies are automatically uploaded to Simple Syllabus.

Also in the template was the course name and description. Theresa learned that this information cannot be changed, since it loads directly from the catalog. So all she had to add was her own course content: assignment due dates, grade policy, class schedule.

One issue she had with Simple Syllabus was paying attention to whether what she added was visible to students. She learned this the hard way when she told students: “You will see x in the syllabus.” But then her students told her that x was not there. So Theresa’s note to other faculty is “Don’t forget to click the button to make sure all sections of your syllabus are visible to the students.”

As a new instructor, Theresa had wasted a lot of time locating the most recent version of the course syllabus she was about to use. She realized that if that previous version had been in Simple Syllabus it would have been easy to locate, as it would already be in VU’s syllabus bank.

One feature of Simple Syllabus that Theresa especially likes is the ease of making changes. If she altered the due date for a discussion board she could just update Simple Syllabus. No need to update a Word document, delete the old one, and then submit the new Word document to BB. All she had to do was let students know that Simple Syllabus had been updated.

Theresa soon realized that, since students are not yet used to Simple Syllabus, they need some help getting oriented. One student told her that it was hard to find things. So she spent just five minutes in class showing all her students how to navigate, and after that no one had a problem.

One thing Theresa changed in her Simple Syllabus was the images in the template. While pictures can be fun for some students, many of her graduate students found them distracting. Moreover, some of them wanted to print out the syllabus without the images. So she just deleted them, which was easy to do.

An improvement she would like to see going forward is to have a department-level Simple Syllabus template. At Theresa’s previous institution, one person had to make sure all the department faculty had uploaded the most recent Word version of their syllabus to a shared drive. Simple Syllabus would eliminate all that work, because the syllabi are already stored and ready for accreditation purposes. But with the addition of a department–level template, the department’s student learning objectives as well as the course objectives could be linked for purposes of accreditation. That would make Simple Syllabus even more valuable.

She definitely plans to use Simple Syllabus again this fall. She can’t imagine going back to a Word document where she has to pull in all of the university-level information herself.

David Rolling, Kinesiology

Dave started with Simple Syllabus because he received an email from Gina Rue asking him if he wanted to try it in his Summer II class. He worked closely with Gina to create the template for this brand new course with a new syllabus.

Dave already had started an existing Word document. He sent it to Gina and she put it in the Simple Syllabus format. However, as he kept making changes to the Word document, he would have to send the changes to Gina to put in Simple Syllabus. In the future, he realized that it would be more efficient for him to work directly in Simple Syllabus himself. So he attended one of Gina’s workshops this Fall to learn how.

Like Theresa, Dave deliberately keeps his syllabus more general. Most of the details are in the assignments, which he uploads to Blackboard. Because he teaches graduate courses, he does not like to work too far ahead and wants the flexibility to adjust.

Dave likes that Simple Syllabus meets accessibility standards. For example, it is designed to be accessible to those who need to use a screen reader. He also sees the advantage for all students in having a common template for syllabi; students can find things more easily when they already know where to look. Type fonts, headings, and location of important course information is currently very different from syllabus to syllabus.

Dave also likes the idea that, when you are teaching a syllabus created by someone else, it will be easy to access in Simple Syllabus. All you have to do is add your own class elements, since much of the template will already be there.

In the future Dave would love it if the university calendar could be embedded in Simple Syllabus. That way you would never have to go back and change dates if you realize, for example, that your schedule is off by a week off due to campus holidays.

Dave said that he will attempt using Simple Syllabus this Fall. He is curious to see what the rest of his department does. Some new faculty, for example, may already have their syllabi created in a format they like.

Final Comments

As relatively new faculty, both Theresa and Dave were very pleased that the university policy information was already loaded into Simple Syllabus. For example, they both merely took the Honor Council statement that was provided as is. In later years, they will probably add their own details about the Honor Code policy. But for this year, they are glad to just accept the language that was already there.

I asked both Theresa and Dave if they had any concerns about syllabi as intellectual property. This was not much of an issue for either of them. Theresa has always had to provide her syllabi for accreditation anyway. For her, it is her specific assignments, loaded separately in Blackboard, that is proprietary. She uses the syllabus merely for dates, deadlines, grading, and policies.

Dave said that he knows that the syllabus becomes the property of the university once it is created and shared. This is why faculty usually provide their syllabi to the department chair, in case someone becomes sick or has to leave. Students, too, can always save it to their computers. Dave thinks that faculty always have the option to keep the syllabus basic and instead put the items that are more your own intellectual property either in Blackboard or in another format.

What both Theresa and Dave want fellow faculty to know about Simple Syllabus is that you should allow time to experiment with it. Jump right in and learn by doing and you will easily figure it out. As with any other new technology, there is a learning curve the first time. Similarly, you need to take just a few minutes in class to help students navigate it for the first time.

To learn more about Simple Syllabus, sign up for a training session either in person or online by emailing instructional designer Gina.Rue@valpo.edu.