Once upon a time, it was a novel idea to put a syllabus online.  Back during my first days of using the web for classes, I hand-constructed a web-based syllabus page.  A few years later, I contemplated, though never completely followed through on the idea of creating a truly multimedia syllabus.  My idea was that each assignment would not only consist of reading material, but would be illustrated by images or video that would also be part of the discussion.  So, for example, I was teaching Shakespeare and adadptations of Shakespeare and I wanted to include a snippet from Shakespeare in Love as well as a photo I had taken of the Globe Theatre in London to give students a clearer idea of what going to the theater was like in the 1600s.  But the task proved pretty onerous even as late as 2001 because taking clips of movies was hard, embedding them in a web site was harder, and I just didn’t have the time or patience to do that.  Having a rich syllabus is something worth striving for.  Although it certainly makes life convenient for students to have a downloadable (and printable) PDF, it seems like one should take advantage of the online medium at a higher level.

I haven’t quite achieved the multimedia syllabus yet, but since I’ve switched to using a blog platform as my course hub, I certainly have the ability to do so without the kind of effort I would have had to make in 2001.  What I have done, though, is to not put the whole syllabus online.  I usually break the course into thirds.  I may have a plan for the whole course, but I don’t reveal it to the students.  Having a syllabus online rather than as a pdf or other type of printable document allows me to change it on the fly and I do rather frequently.  I respond to the pace the students are going at and speed things up or slow things down.  Things happen, like I have to miss a class for illness or we decide to take a field trip somewhere that’s appropriate for the course, but which wasn’t originally planned.  I also try to be open about the fact that my syllabus, my structure for the course is simply my interpretation of how the course might be taught and so I leave room to change my mind, within the semester itself.   I have even, with great success, simply set aside a couple of weeks, give them a general theme and have had the students select appropriate materials or we’ve voted on them.  It means the students take on some responsibility for the course, deciding what it is they would like to know more about and through what medium.  Things like this could certainly be done with paper syllabi, but it seems online spaces allow so much more.  You could, at the extreme, have a wiki syllabus and let it be created throughout the semester.  That might be too unsettling for students and faculty alike, but imagine what might come out of it.  It could be a really intereting class.

So how do you create syllabi online?  What affordances does the online space offer you?