Syllabus Resources
Often, when we talk about syllabi, we talk about the requirements for syllabi, whether imposed by a university, department, or program. These are important - the syllabus does represent somewhat of a contract between the faculty and the students, and it is important that we portray our course policies accurately and clearly for our students, in order to prevent trouble down the road for us and our students. The Provost's Office sends out an email about syllabus requirements each semester, and we urge you to take that seriously.
With this said, the syllabus is also a tool for introducing ourselves and our course to our students. Ideally, a syllabus helps students to get excited about the course they are taking, to be eager to work with their instructors, and to feel as if they are welcome and supported in their class. A good syllabus can get the semester off to a stronger start.
The Faculty Development Center is pleased to present this web page on effective syllabus construction, with appreciation to Hannah Bollin, who has played the lead role in cultivating this site. We hope you find these resources to be useful to you in constructing and refining the syllabi you use for your courses. As always, please feel free to contact us if you have ideas for other material we could include on this site.
Content
Ultimately, the most important part of a syllabus lies within its content. With this in mind, we have curated the following list of resources to help instructors learn which content can help and hinder a syllabus. This list includes parts of a syllabus which are required by the University such as Title IX verbiage, while also offering suggestions on ways to build a student-focused and inclusive syllabus through content.
Diversity Statements
Including a diversity statement on your syllabus can signal to students your commitment to building an inclusive and supportive space. This resource by Carnegie Mellon University asks instructors guiding questions, offers suggestions, and provides examples to help write diversity statements for a course's syllabus.
Some notable suggestions:
Your statement should articulate to your students why being inclusive matters to you, specifically, and how that relates to your discipline, course, and desired classroom climate.
It can be helpful to consider your discipline's history with underrepresented groups, and how disciplinary conventions might work to facilitate or become obstacles to inclusion.
After drafting your statement, check whether the rest of your syllabus and course design matches your diversity statement in tone and spirit, that is to say, is also positive and inclusive.
- Be inclusive by recognizing different types of diversity in your statement.
To learn more about diversity statements (and potentially writing your own), click here.
Faculty Syllabus Language on Mandatory Reporting Duties
Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response Office
Address
100 Boone Hall
Ypsilanti, Michigan 48197
734.487.9126
[email protected]EMU faculty and staff members who are mandatory employee reporters are reminded that reporting of alleged sexual misconduct is mandated and expected when they become aware of incidents or experiences involving members of the campus community, regardless of how they learn of the potential misconduct, whether in person, in writing, or online.
This resource by EMU'S Sexual Misconduct Prevention & Response Office provides verbiage for faculty to proactively inform students about their mandatory reporting duties.
To read the Faculty Syllabus Language, click here.
To read the Sexual Misconduct Prevention & Response Office FAQ for faculty, click here.
How to Build a Student-Friendly Syllabus
In this blog post, Hannah Bollin (doctoral student of Educational Studies and GA at the Faculty Development Center) discusses her findings after hosting a focus group at the FDC to investigate what college students look for in a syllabus.
Results of this focus group found that students most often spoke of looking for welcoming language, organized formatting, and consistency in a course's syllabus.
To learn more, read Bollin's blog post here.
Syllabus Checklist
This resource by Washington University in St. Louis provides an in-depth checklist and desciption of what instructors should be including within their syllabi each semester.
According to this resource, some of the things that should always be included are:
- Course description and course goals;
- Texts, materials, and supplies;
- Grading details;
- Attendance, participation, and classroom climate;
- Resources for students;
- Course schedules.
To read this syllabus checklist, click here.
To download the Syllabus Template provided by this resource, click here
Syllabus Rubric
Gauge how student-focused or content-focused your own syllabus is using this Syllabus Rubric Scoring Sheet and User Guide by the University of Virginia's Center for Teaching Excellence.
To learn more about this Rubric, click here.
Design
This list includes ways that instructors can make their syllabi more effective, student-friendly, and accessible through simple design and structural changes. These resources are intended to make instructors think about ways that they can engage students within a course while also being mindful of accessibility issues.
Accessible Syllabus
Accessible design is an ongoing process. Accessible syllabus welcomes collaboration and critique.
Please contact them via email or join the conversation with #accessiblesyllabus.
Accessible Syllabus is a website dedicated to helping instructors build syllabi for diverse student abilities and promotes an atmosphere in which students feel comfortable discussing their unique abilities. This resource is driven by the belief that students would use syllabi more effectively if they were designed more accessibly.
Accessibility is necessary for all learning, and disability studies provides a key lens through which to question our classroom practices and resources. To create more inclusive teaching, instructors must plan for diversity in the classroom and adapt to the immediate needs of students.
To learn more about Accessible Syllabus and the many different image, text, and rhetoric resources that they supply, click here.
Creating a Syllabus that Students Want to Read
This article by Pearson (2022) offers tips on how to make your syllabus more appealing to student audiences. These tips include:
- Make it visually appealing (use visuals such as images, graphs, diagrams, and visually appealing organization of content)
- Turn it into a video or infographic (especially with asynchronous courses!)
- Consider your tone and wording (stay warm and student-focused, use inclusive and affirming language for students of all identities)
To read this article, click here.
To view Pearson's example of a visual syllabus, click here.
Helping Students Through Your Syllabus
In this post from the FDC blog, Matt Schumann (Department of History and Philosophy) discusses an innovative way to prepare a course syllabus by switching from programs like Word and Docs to Powerpoint and Slides. By making this switch, Schumann suggests that syllabi can be more visual and it can help students navigate course information.
To learn more, read Schumann's blog post here.
To view a basic syllabus template provided by Schumann, click here.
How to Create an Infographic Syllabus With Piktochart
This resource provides helpful tips and examples on building an infographic syllabus.
Here are a few of our favorite tips:
Break up your syllabus into digestible bites
Focus on the questions students will have about your class
Use a cohesive, clean, unified color scheme/theme. Keep it classy (pun intended).
Utilize QR Codes
Keep your words short and to the point
To read more of these tips, view the examples provided, and even use the Piktochart templates for your own syllabus, click here.
To view more infographic templates, view Canva's library here.
Syllabus Templates
Visme has a curated list of templates to help educators customize their syllabus and engage their students through visually-appealing graphics.
To use a syllabus template, click here.
Would a Course Syllabus Be Better as an Infographic?
In this article, Newbold (2014) discusses the postiive reactions that he received from students after summarizing his 15-page syllabus into a short 3-page infograph. This work does not necessarily argue for or against the use of an infograph for a syllabus, but instead weighs the strengths and weaknesses of this format.
To read this article and view Newbold's example syllabus, click here.
If there are any resources that you'd like to recommend for this page, please contact us at [email protected].
Further reading
If you are interested in reading up-to-date literature and research about syllabus design and effectiveness, we have curated the following list of resources.
"Best Practices in Syllabus Design" (2022)
In this paper, Wagner et al (2022) investigates which elements of a syllabus are essential to both student and faculty success within a course (ex. Including the grading policy and the ways to get a hold of the professor).
Some key recommendations from this resource include:
- Instructors explaining the reasoning behind their attendance policy in their syllabus
- Including ways students can prepare for each class session
- Taking time to consider roadblocks/obstacles that will come up during the semester while writing the syllabus
If interested learning more, click here.
Wagner, J. L., Smith, K. J., Johnson, C., Hilaire, M. L., & Medina, M. S. (2022, April 1). Best practices in syllabus design. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education. Retrieved November 2022, from https://www.ajpe.org/content/early/2022/04/29/ajpe8995
"It's in the syllabus ... or is it?" (2021) Expand dropdownIn this study, Gin et al. (2021) examine 72 biology course syllabi from a research-intensive university to examine their content and implications. Their results find that instructors were more likely to include information regarding course expectations and less likely to include information around creating a positive classroom environment. More specifically, it was found that the most common topic raised in syllabi regarding classroom climate was providing advice for success in the course while the least common was a diversity and inclusion statement.
To read this article, click here.
Gin, L. E., Scott, R. A., Pfeiffer, L. D., Zheng, Y., Cooper, K. M., & Brownell, S. E. (2021, April 7). It's in the syllabus ... or is it? how biology syllabi can serve as communication tools for creating inclusive classrooms at a large-enrollment research institution. Advances in Physiology Education. Retrieved November 14, 2022, from https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/advan.00119.2020
"Project Syllabus: An Exploratory Study of Learner-Centered Syllabi" (2019)
This study examined 109 syllabi from Project Syllabi, a long-term project with the goal to make syllabi across the country more student-friendly and exemplary. The database that Project Syllabi maintains is meant to provide examples for faculty members when writing their own syllabi. This study’s main focus was on determining what a student-friendly, or learner-centered, syllabus really is and found that syllabi that are consistent in tone, the length of a syllabus, and the amount of images used are all factors that go into determining how learner-centered a syllabus is.
To read this article, click here.
Richmond, A. S., Morgan, R. K., Slattery, J. M., Mitchell, N. G., & Cooper, A. G. (2019, January). Project syllabus: An exploratory study of learner-centered syllabi . Retrieved November 2022, from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0098628318816129
"Syllabus Tone, More Than Mental Health Statements, Influence Intentions to Seek Help" (2021)
With the rise of mental health issues on college campuses as well as a rising awareness of mental health issue, this study sought to find out if the tone of a syllabus or a brief welcoming statement about mental health in a syllabus encouraged students to reach out for help more if they were struggling. Syllabi were written for the study to either be written in a “warm-tone” or to include a statement about reaching out about mental health. In the study, students responded as more likely to reach out in both scenarios, but about different issues depending on which syllabi they received. Some of the issues students said they’d be more likely to reach out to a professor about included things like family issues, medical issues, and needing help with class assignments.
To read this article, click here.
Gurung, R. A. R., & Galardi, N. R. (2021, February 11). Syllabus Tone, More Than Mental Health Statements, Influence Intentions to Seek Help. Retrieved November 2022, from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0098628321994632
"Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything" (2020)
In Syllabus, William Germano and Kit Nicholls take a fresh look at this essential but almost invisible bureaucratic document and use it as a starting point for rethinking what students—and teachers—do. What if a teacher built a semester’s worth of teaching and learning backward—starting from what students need to learn to do by the end of the term, and only then selecting and arranging the material students need to study?
If you are interested in borrowing this book from the FDC library, send us an email ([email protected]) to reserve it!
If you are interested in buying your own copy of Syllabus, click here.