Effective Syllabus
Your course syllabus can serve as both a warm welcome and a roadmap for success in your course鈥攚hich means creating one can be a time-consuming exercise! Check out some university resources, plus some best practices, to make your most effective syllabus yet.
有料盒子视频 Syllabus Resources
You are not on your own when it comes to making a syllabus! The university offers resources to help ensure you are providing the necessary information to students. The Faculty Senate Checklist is a list of elements that are officially required or suggested. You can use this checklist to design your own syllabus, or use the syllabus template to guide you. The CTL regularly updates the syllabus template to align with Faculty Senate requirements.
What Makes a Syllabus Effective?
While the university has great resources for developing your syllabus, it鈥檚 up to you to fill in the content! In Latin, the word syllabus essentially means 鈥渓ist.鈥 While today鈥檚 syllabi tend to be more complex documents, it can be helpful to remember that a syllabus is essentially a simple list of things students can expect in the course. A primary goal of the syllabus is to present information in a way that is accessible and easy to navigate for a group of learners from various backgrounds with various values and needs.
At the same time, your syllabus is one of the first communications you鈥檒l have with your students and presents an opportunity to begin establishing your relationship with them. It can be very challenging to thoroughly communicate the details of a class, set expectations, and provide university requirements while trying also trying to create a document that is welcoming and not overwhelming long for students.
What to do then? Just like within our teaching, it can be helpful to stay outcomes focused. Fundamentally, an effective syllabus is one that will help students succeed in the course while also streamlining your own experience of teaching.
An increasingly evidence-based strategy for hitting all these marks is to create a 鈥渓earner-centered鈥 syllabus. As opposed to 鈥渢eacher-centered,鈥 a learner-centered syllabus is intentionally oriented towards explaining to students how they can be successful in the course.
According to Richmond (2016), a learner-centered syllabus emphasizes instructor accessibility, offers rationale for course procedures and assignments, delineates instructor responsibilities as well as students鈥, and invites student input. As a result: 鈥淎 learner-centered syllabus may cause students to perceive the teacher as possessing more exemplary teaching characteristics (e.g.,approachability, flexibility) and greater rapport with them. Moreover, students remember more details from a learner-centered syllabus鈥 (p. 2). Further, a 2024 study found that learner-centered syllabus design were correlated with reduced opportunity gaps for women and minoritized students in STEM classes (Eslami et. al).
How Can I Make My Syllabus More Learner-centered?
A great way to make an effective learner-centered syllabus is to have the student reading it in mind as you create it! How would you engage directly with a student who had a question about your assignments or grading policies? Here are some more elements that can boost the effectiveness of your syllabus:
Visual design
The intentional use of visual formatting (headings, columns, color, etc) and images can help break up the sections of your syllabus and make your syllabus much easier to navigate for students. The correct use of headings will also make your syllabus more accessible for students who use screen-readers. Read more on our Accessibility page.
Communicate clear expectations for all (you included)
A learner-centered syllabus can absolutely have strong boundaries; they are just shared in a clear, human way. It鈥檚 also a wonderful practice to let students know what they can expect from you: How can they expect you to respond to their questions? With what tone? In what manner? When can they expect grades to be returned?
Policies & language
Experiment with writing your course policies the way you would in an email to a struggling student. In his presentation, Matthew Cheney asks, 鈥淲hat鈥檚 the tone of your syllabus? Do negative commands overwhelm positive invitations? Is the premise of the syllabus that students are untrustworthy? Are your policies designed to punish more than to support? Does the language reflect this?鈥
Offer the rationale for your decisions
Another great heuristic from Cheney鈥檚 :" how would the words 鈥渂ecause I say so鈥 added to your policies impact them? Does it sound like a natural progression? You can curb this by sharing why you say so! Your course policies likely have a carefully reasoned rationale behind them; let your students in on those thought processes.
Grade yourself!
Richmond (2016) offers a useful rubric to assess the learner-centeredness of your syllabus. Download the article and give it a try!
More Ideas for an Effective Syllabus
While, yes, the required elements of the syllabus already makes for a fairly long document, there are many reasons to add well-chosen additional elements to your syllabus. Some common learner-centered additions include:
- Table of contents: This is useful for longer syllabi, and if you syllabus is a Google Doc, you can easily with section hyperlinks, so students can jump to the section they need to reference.
- Land/territory acknowledgment: Check out from Trent University on how to integrate meaningful land or territory acknowledgments in your course.
- Content warnings: Content warnings can help students prepare for more difficult content that may come up in your course. has an excellent resource with current research and the types of content you may want to flag.
- A one-pager or TL;DR section: If you want space to get into all the details but know that some students may get bogged down by syllabus length, consider writing up an abbreviated version with the most essential details, either as a linked document or a short summary on the syllabus itself. TL;DRs (internet for 鈥渢oo long, didn鈥檛 read鈥) can also be used section-by-section, as in .
- Community resources: Consider adding a list of resources that can help welcome students further into your discipline and community, as well as university and community resources that could support them as a whole person. Options include links to relevant student clubs, study groups, community events, local food banks, shelters, libraries, etc.
Considerations for Online Courses
Student Effort
The 有料盒子视频 Faculty Senate has determined that one credit hour [of non-laboratory instruction] represents 鈥," which, for the standard 14-week semester, equates to a minimum of 1 hour of lecture (instruction) + 2 hours of study per credit hour.
Because we want all student activity to be meaningful, 有料盒子视频 CTL asks instructors to further document where student effort goes by percentage of effort into four categories that expand on the simple lecture/study ratio. These categories will demonstrate how the student will be spending their required time in the course. The four categories are:
- Instruction (minimum 33%: things like lectures, readings, teacher-student conferences)
- Individual Research (individual research for papers, projects)
- Assignments (actual projects and assessments)
- Collaboration (discussion, groups projects, blog commenting)
Example:
- Instruction: Lecture/Readings 35%
- Individual Research: Final project 10%
- Assignments: Quizzes, Homework, Blog posts 35%
- Collaboration: Discussion Board, Blog comments 20%
You may choose not to publish this information to your students, however, it is a necessary element to think about in the course development stage.
Submitting Assignments
Include guidelines for submitting assignments. What types of files are acceptable? Do you have file naming conventions? Should students submit on Canvas? Google Drive? A class blog? Be specific and be prepared to guide students through the submission process.
Response Time and Feedback
Clarify your policies on response time and feedback to students as part of your course policies. Set expectations for students by providing a specific window of time they can expect to hear back from you concerning email communications. Feedback on class assignments will likely be more time consuming, so clarify when you will be grading and when students should expect feedback on their coursework.
Technologies and Technology Support
If students are expected to use particular technologies in your course, provide links to where they can find those technologies. Include links to support services for these technologies when they are available. Outline any technical specifications for required software (Windows and Mac OS) or hardware.
If you are using 3rd-party tools in your course, provide links to support resources such as tutorials, accessibility information, and privacy policies.
"But No One Reads the Syllabus!"
It can be really discouraging to work so hard on a document that you sense will be ignored (鈥渋t鈥檚 in the syllabus鈥 isn鈥檛 a common teaching meme for nothing!). While inviting designs and learner-centered language are great steps to help students understand the benefits of the syllabus, it never hurts to incentivize reading and referencing the syllabus. Strategies include:
- Syllabus Day: It鈥檚 a classic鈥攕pend some time on the first day of a synchronous course talking through the syllabus and/or develop an welcome activity that engage students with the course goals, topics, or schedule. If you are teaching asynchronously online, translate that day into your first week with online discussion and activities. The main idea: don't leave students to tackle the syllabus all on their own.
- Syllabus Quiz: A short quiz on key elements of the syllabus. These are most effective if you focus on vital information to help students develop quick recall for the most essential course procedures. Consider also including an ungraded open-ended response where students can ask questions or express concerns.
- The Annotated Syllabus: As an alternative to the syllabus quiz, try asking your students to annotate your syllabus with an online tool like Google Drive or Hypothesis. You may see an uptick in questions, as well as useful suggestions and feedback! Read more about .
- Easter Eggs: Incorporate valuable Easter eggs, or hidden features that if discovered will yield perks like extra credit, in your syllabus. Contrary to popular practice, you鈥檒l likely see better results if you let students know that Easter eggs are there to be found (after all, Easter egg hunts aren鈥檛 usually a surprise event!). Read more .
Examples
Check out the examples below for creatively designed and organized syllabi:
- -- simple PDF that uses image and design for clear organization
- -- a syllabus as FAQs
- -- a syllabus as infographic
- -- hand-illustrated syllabus
- - a recorded presentation from the CTL on creating a highly visual syllabi.
Further Resources
Research Foundations
Barry, L. (2014). . Montreal, Quebec: Drawn & Quarterly.
Cheney, M. (2020). Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast. February 13, 2020.
Eslami, M., Denaro, K., Collins, P., Sumarsono, J. M., Dennin, M., & Sato, B. (2024). How syllabi relate to outcomes in higher education: A study of syllabi learner-centeredness and grade inequities in STEM. PLOS ONE, 19(4), e0301331.
Richmond, A. S. (2016). "."
Slattery, J. M., & Carlson, J. F. (2005). . College Teaching.