Faculty-Friendly Syllabi: Strategies For Efficient & Accurate Syllabus Creation

Syllabi creation is a critical, yet time-consuming process that faculty must repeat each academic term. Using templates and auto-populate features saves time and ensures information is accurate for students and regulatory bodies.

The Importance of Effective Syllabus Creation

A syllabus sets the tone for a course and provides important information to students. However, creating an effective syllabus requires significant time and effort from faculty each term. Requiring faculty to build new syllabi each term also creates a risk that policies included in syllabi are no longer the most current. Leveraging templates and auto-populate features help save faculty time and ensure that syllabi are clear, accurate, and consistent.

Implement Pre-Populated Templates to Save Time & Ensure Accuracy

Traditionally, faculty relied on syllabi from previous terms or had to create new syllabi from scratch each term. However, it is time consuming to format, research policies, and input new information into syllabi each time. Pre-made templates take the burden off of faculty by providing them with institutional branding, formatting, and standard policies. Providing faculty with templates allows them to spend their time on curricular content, rather than formatting documents and chasing down policies.

Pre-populated templates also benefit students, as it ensures that they have access to the most up-to-date policies and don’t receive conflicting information from different course syllabi. Critical information often covered in syllabi include academic honesty and accessibility policies. It’s imperative that students have the correct information and aren’t referencing inaccurate policies pulled from old syllabi.

Auto-Populate Course Scheduling Information

An integrated academic operations ecosystem allows institutions to pull course information from their scheduling system right into syllabi. This means faculty can auto-populate their syllabi with scheduling information for the current term. This includes class time, sections, locations, and exam dates. This both saves faculty time and ensures there is parity between information in the scheduling system and what’s displayed on syllabi.

Standardize Syllabus Formatting For Brand Consistency

Syllabus templates allow institutions to standardize formatting to achieve brand consistency. This may include consistency across fonts, colors, formatting, fields displayed, and more. With pre-set formatting, faculty don’t have to reinvent the wheel each term and syllabi will reflect a consistent brand identity.

While using one template across the institution is ideal, there may be instances where certain departments or disciplines need to display different types of information. For example, a lab course or live studio art course may need to provide different information on a syllabus than a lecture course. Providing dynamic templates helps achieve the nuance needed for different types of courses.

Pull in Course Information From the Curriculum System or Previous Syllabi

Rather than manually typing out information such as the course name, description, or learning objectives each term, an integrated academic operations ecosystem enables faculty to pull in this information from previous syllabi or directly from the curriculum system. If the course has not changed since the previous term, pulling in information from the previous syllabus means faculty don’t have to spend time recreating existing content.

Alternatively, automatically pulling in course information from the curriculum system ensures that syllabi, especially for recently updated courses, always display the most recent and accurate course information. This eliminates the risk of faculty pulling in old information and saves them time from having to hunt down information.

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