As you ramp up for the next semester and pondering ways to get students to read your syllabus, consider some of these techniques.
- In 2015, Joseph A Howledy (Columbia University) snuck a phrase in his syllabus asking his students to send an email to himself with a photo of the lovable character ALF from the eponymous eighties television show. While he admitted that there is a shelf-life on this gag, he does remind us that things like this succeed in introducing FYE students to the importance of reading the syllabus. If you don’t like ALF references, you could always channel your inner Van Halen…
- Kenyon Wilson (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) embedded a high-value reward for readers of his syllabus. On page two (of three – and we should commend him for such a brief syllabus) Wilson included the words: “Free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five”. While this might not be a sustainable mechanism, perhaps there is a way to build on this. What if you left a small piece of paper in an old Altoids tin taped to the bottom of a couch in the Library and directed students in your syllabus to add their name to it?
- Engage your students by having them collaboratively annotate the syllabus. Encourage them to ask questions, identify the hot spots in the document, or add their own ideas. Not only is this a great way to tease dialogue and critical thinking out of your students, but introducing them to social annotation tools like Hypothes.is introduces voltage into your class. Questions about the potency of social reading and annotating? Look at Curt’s post about Hypothes.is from 2020.
- Include a TL;DR section in your syllabus. In internet lingo, TL;DR means “too long, didn’t read”. Oftentimes at the end of a long post you’ll see a TL;DR followed by a succinct summary. Consider adding a TL;DR right near the top of your syllabus that includes an itemized list of the really important parts of your syllabus. You can read a bit more about that idea in our post from December 2021.
- Add flair to your syllabus with comics! Is this gimmicky? Sure. Is it fun? You bet! Will your students read the syllabus? I don’t know, but they’ll probably at least read the comic strips. Perhaps one of the best comics to put in your syllabus is anything found in the catalog of “xkcd”. You’ve probably seen these comics floating around online – and with good reason. They are funny. They are snarky. They cover a lot of topics in academia. And they are licensed through Creative Commons – which means the author has given explicit consent for you to use them. For more information on Creative Commons, check out our post from August 2020 or ask your friendly librarians.
CC-BY-NA via xkcd - Spice up the curb appeal of your syllabus! Dr. McLaughlin from Notre Dame has an awesome syllabus in the form of an infographic. Even adding in a pie chart that shows the grading breakdown is helpful for students. Piktochart makes it easy to make infographics and even offers some good tips on how to create one. And if you don’t like Piktochart, you can always use Canva Pro (it was created by an educator and is ridiculously easy to use!) – anyone with a .edu email address has full access!
Ⓒ Dr. McLaughlin – used with permission - Make it a game. Or games. Imagine a sweet, sweet word search after one section in your syllabus (that includes terms from that section). And maybe the next section has a crossword with clues germane to that section. There are plenty of free tools out there to help you create these interactive summaries. The crossword below was made with Crossword Labs. You might even consider a small prize for students who complete all the games (or make the games an assignment).
- John Rose (Kent State University) includes links to his syllabi in the signature of his email. This is a great way to signal the importance of the syllabus.
- In Brightspace, create a guided quiz based on the syllabus. In this idea, a “guided quiz” is a tool where the learner is permitted to use the syllabus (like an open book test) and each question asks the learner to answer a question about the syllabus. It’s a much better experience for the learner if the questions on the quiz are encountered in the same order as they appear in the syllabus. Allow learners the opportunity to take the quiz as many times as they’d like. Configure the assessment such that only when the student achieves a 100% on the quiz will it unlock the rest of the content in the course. This is a win-win! The students get an “A” as their first grade and you can rest easy knowing that the students have gone through the syllabus.
- In the spirit of the subtle, interactive puzzles and mystery discussed in the post from last week, let’s add one more to our arsenal: palindromes. Try nonchalantly including palindromes in your syllabus. If you carefully choose palindromes (with pivot letters – the letter or letters in the middle of the word) you can spell out a secret message. The following palindromes might be scattered across the syllabus. For instance, decoding the message yields “DAVE”.
radar, yay, level, heh
If you don’t have an appetite for any of these ideas, you can see Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis suggest in their recent post in Inside Higher Ed (we’ve recommended Cathy’s latest book and her podcasts appearances in previous blogs.
Be sure to share with your colleagues your novel syllabus ideas!
