Syllabus Bloat, Redux.
Higher education course syllabi, like pufferfish, are prone to bloat.
A blogpost from two years ago, revised and puffed up for my graduate seminar in online teaching and learning.
It’s the middle of the term, which means students will now start asking about courses for next term. The conversation goes something like this: “Would it be possible to see a syllabus for your course, Professor Skidmore?” “Possible? Yes, anything's possible. Likely? No.”
But I’m not looking forward to writing the syllabus. Not because I don’t know what I want to do in the course - I’m actually quite clear on that score - but because I don’t like what has become of university syllabi in the past few years.
An early 19th-century rendering by Kawahara Keiga of a blowfish in full bloat. Photo by Jung Mi. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.
There’s a tendency among higher education instructors to pack as much as possible into a syllabus. Part of this is ordained from on high: policies must be made public, assistance available to students must be communicated - boilerplate on academic integrity, academic support services, mental health counselling, and policies governing grading and petitions.
But from the syllabi I’ve seen, much of the bloat is our own doing. A couple of years ago, I was talking to a colleague at the beginning of term. She was quite proud of the syllabus she had just created. I asked her what she liked about it. “It’s so complete! I’ve got everything in there.” She must have been telling the truth because her syllabus was 18 pages long.
This is partially a professional hazard: the whole point of our academic profession is to look into problems as fully as possible, to consider every issue, to cover all angles and perspectives. This then creeps into our syllabi as well. We don’t want to miss anything, if for no other reason than out of fear that colleagues might see the syllabus and think: “Harrumph. Kind of simplistic.”
The contention here is that there are a number of factors contributing the most to syllabus bloat:
Elaborate learning outcomes: Don’t misunderstand me: it is important to enunciate learning outcomes. Students need to know what the point of the whole enterprise is. And outcomes help me as the course planner to focus on what’s important, which is especially helpful when I find myself trying to stuff too much content into a course. I want to suggest, however, that we sometimes write learning outcomes the way we write academic papers: we don’t have students in mind, but rather our peers. We’re talking over our students’ heads in order to make sure our peers respect the advanced nature of the content we’re presenting. I came to this realization after teaching a section of a faculty-wide course that had standardized learning outcomes. For example, one outcome read: “Practice writing and speaking in iterative communication assignments in a variety of genres and for a variety of audiences, including the design and effective presentation of quantitative or qualitative information.” I provided a translation for the students: “You'll practice different forms of communication.”
Elaborate content descriptions: there’s a temptation to outline readings, introduce topics, explain and develop a context for the content in the course. This can be wordy.
Elaborate assignments: We want to be good instructors, so we devise multiple avenues of assessment that will take into account various goals and skills. We don’t want to just test our students, we want to let them prove themselves via intricate assessment models. And if we’re really progressive, we view assessment as formative, as part of the learning process. But with elaborate assessment techniques comes more elaborate grading rubrics, more class policies on group work and late submissions, more things to explain. With every explanation or justification, the syllabus puffs up like a big old blowfish.
Elaborate fear of student litigiousness: when students wish to grieve a grade, they will use the syllabus to contend that the instructor was not following the rules they set out for the course. The syllabus is viewed as a kind of contract and, like any contract that is trying to cover all legal bases, it begins to expand.
There are other contributing factors as well. Some instructors think the syllabus is a good place to express their political or social views, like a prof at the University of Waterloo who thinks that COVID-19 is a “fake emergency.” Others explain to students the finer points of email etiquette (“Hi Professor!” is fine, “Yo, Prof Boy” is less fine). It all adds up.
Can anything be done? One thing to keep in mind is that we don’t have to teach the course in the syllabus; that’s what we have the course for. Giving students enough information to orient themselves to the content, but no more, is probably enough. Focus on the most straightforward explanation of course content and outcomes.
It also helps if we can keep courses as simple as possible. The simpler the course, the simpler the syllabus. I find some courses get out of my control and become more complex than I would like, and that’s usually a result of wanting to get all that good content into the students’ noggins. But course complexity can also be the result of all the rules and rubrics that accompany certain types of assignments (group work can be notorious for this), and I lean more and more towards avoiding the kind of activity that requires a lot of explanation, rules, and the like. I don’t always achieve that, though, to my chagrin.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 21/60.
