In January 2005, Rosemary Knight, former chair of C-USP (the Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Policy), came across an editorial in the Stanford Daily that pointed out how difficult it was for students to access course syllabi to plan for course selection.
Students have been using two ways to go about acquiring syllabi for prospective courses. They either go from class to class and collect hard copies of course syllabi during Stanford's shopping period or they sign up for courses in CourseWork. (CourseWork is a widely used course management system at Stanford that requires membership within a course to access its course materials, like syllabi.) Neither option is ideal. (See also, Piloting CourseWork v5 for Winter, Spring, Summer 2007 in this issue.)
Stanford Syllabus Begins
To improve this situation, C-USP spent much time considering potential solutions. The plan that was ultimately selected was the development of a new online system that would function as the headquarters of all Stanford course syllabi. With strong support from the ASSU Undergraduate Senate, the Advising Center, and the Office of Accessible Education, and with financial support from Provost Etchemendy, Academic Computing developed Stanford Syllabus and introduced it (as a pilot project) to the Stanford community during Fall 2006. Over 400 Stanford courses have posted syllabi to the new tool since its inauguration.
Advantages of Stanford Syllabus
The online system for Stanford syllabi offers these advantages:
- Students and their advisors can plan for course selection in advance, since instructors can post their course syllabi to any courses that have entries in the Registrar's database.
- Advanced access to course requirements will allow the Office of Accessible Education to offer students with disabilities better support and access to course materials.
- Students and instructors do not need to rely on any course management systems and their requirements to post or to view course syllabi.
- Instructors can make their syllabi publicly accessible or accessible only to the Stanford community.
How to Use the Stanford Syllabus Tool
To access Stanford Syllabus, go to:
To view syllabi, select the academic term and subject area of interest. By default, the tool will display only course offerings that have syllabi. To post syllabi, click Admin Syllabus. Anyone with a faculty or staff affiliation at Stanford can post a syllabus.
Stanford Syllabus will continue to operate as a pilot tool for Winter 2007, as Academic Computing fine-tunes its performance. During the pilot period, the tool may not perform as fast or may not be as consistently available as it will be when it is in final production.
For More Information
You can find frequently asked questions about Stanford Syllabus at:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/syllabus/faqs/
You can also submit a HelpSU request by going to http://syllabus.stanford.edu/ and clicking on the HelpSU link at the bottom of the screen.
