Increasingly, the web-based syllabus resembles Grand Central Station, with students accessing the course home page in order to link to a host of oth er online resources. There exists a growing expectation among students for varying degrees of technological enhancement in the courses they take. Students quickly apprehend the benefits that a course webpage or electronic mailing list bring to their learning in and enjoyment of a class. Putting the course policies, description, and syllabus online gives students the kind of access to information that they too often misplace, forget, or mismanage. Beyond the present semester, though, the online syllabus can become an effective marketing and outreach tool.
Students shop around for courses that fit both their personal needs and their degree requirements.
As student expectations for technology continue to rise, they will increasingly turn to the web to give them a sense of what a course will offer. Given this secondary use as a means of outreach, placing a course syllabus online can be a two-edged sword, so you should be careful enough to make your course syllabus is suitable for a wide variety of audiences. While working on a project to help medical and nursing faculty move their courses onto the Web, IAT Fellow Doug Short also encouraged them to rethink the traditional syllabus structure arranged only by date and class length. This rethinking resulted in retooling the traditional syllabus, using a 10 point form for each learning event. Publishing on the web allowed faculty to break the syllabus into modules, any of which could easily be reused in other courses.