At GCC, faculty and students deserve nice things to support their success. With that in mind, we’re excited to introduce Simple Syllabus, our new syllabus management platform that’s about to make life a lot easier for everyone on campus. We’re stepping into a new era of efficiency, clarity, and creativity in syllabus design, and we’re looking forward to seeing how departments can use this tool to communicate with and engage current and, possibly, future students.
While faculty are not required to use this new tool, there are several things about it that might make you want to at least try it out:
- the syllabus template contains all the items that are required by A.R. 3.6, ensuring compliance,
- the template is easy to edit and manipulate, giving a lot of control to faculty who want to try something different,
- the template is already accessible and has a built in accessibility checker that will correct most items it notes as not being accessible,
- banners, images, and videos can be added easily,
- course textbooks can be searched and added to the syllabus quickly and easily,
- while creating your first syllabus using this template might take a little bit of time, future syllabi are copied and modified in just minutes,
- any district changes can be pushed out to all syllabi easily,
- syllabi can be shared with other instructors,
- you can see which students have read the syllabus and how often they’ve come back to it,
- I’m not sure where to stop this list!
We learn something interesting about this tool all the time, and a lot of the learning comes from instructors who used it over the summer or are creating a syllabus for the first time right now and asking questions. So while our trainings now are focusing on the basics, we will be helping all of you to “level up” with later trainings based on a lot of what we learn from you.
Stop by the CTLE or pop into open lab online to have any questions answered. Can’t wait to see how great your syllabi look!