Time For An Extreme Syllabus Make-Over?

"The Syllabus"...the single most important document a professor shares with her students.  Professors spend hours perfecting each syllabus through rigorous revisions and each semester stress the importance of reading it to their students.  But how closely do students read it? How effective is it at communicating critical details, as well as high level information about your course?  And are you leveraging the maximum learning potential of a syllabus -- can it be more than just a reference resource?


The Value of Visual Communication
A syllabus is a reference resource that can easily span 5, 6, 7 or more pages.  Most reference resources produced today outside of higher education are designed with a blend of text and images.  Compare a college textbook published in 2011 with one published in 1995.  You'll find a significant increase in the visual diagrams, colored call out boxes, and icons used throughout the chapters.  These often function to summarize main points and weave information back and forth through a text, in an effort to facilitate connections between ideas and foster critical thinking. Images and icons are also utilized to communicate information in a secondary way, guide the eye through the content, and call out important details.  Would your students consider your syllabus a more meaningful, helpful resource if it too integrated thoughtful images and graphics along with text?


Several years ago, I transformed my 10-page, black-and-white, text-based syllabus into a visual gem.  Students responded with gratitude.  One student wrote to me on the first day of class, "I can tell you really care about your teaching."  I found it was quite amazing how quickly my careless typos were found too (evidence that they were reading it!).  

More Than Meets the Eye
But aside from the aesthetically pleasing qualities of designing syllabi with images and text, the National Center on Universal Design for Learning encourages "providing multiple means of representation" in the design and development of learning environments:  "[L]earning, and transfer of learning, occurs when multiple representations are used, because it allows students to make connections within, as well as between, concepts." 

In my syllabus redesign, I integrated images of my students at art galleries and museums -- standing in front of art works of all shapes and sizes -- in an effort to make their entrance into the class more relevant.  I also included thumbnail size images of artworks that we'd study throughout the class.  By referencing the syllabus throughout the term, students would realize and reflect on what they had learned about the images, gaining a deeper understanding of how context informs interpretation.

Resources
If you'd like to consider a syllabus make-over, you may enjoy the following shared resources:

• Educator's Guide to a 21st Century Syllabus
• Sample Visual Syllabus

Zooming Into the Future of Visual Learning

It seems that my post earlier this week was the equivalent of discovering an entire subculture of web 2.0 tools that have been thriving right under my nose! My Prezi post received one comment thus far from "anonymous" (thank you!) who shared links to ahead.com and zoomorama.com, two more intriguing tools that demonstrate how flash technology is providing a new platform and entirely new anatomy of a visual presentation. Based on "zooming" in an out, rather than clicking linearly from slide to slide, all of these slides are based on similar design concepts but each seem to have individual interfaces. I'm a novice to them all and, by no means, have this mastered but I really like what I see.

Of course, I keep thinking about creating educational content with these tools for online classes. Keeping in mind that the majority of online enrollments in the United States occur at community colleges and most CC faculty need to rely upon their own skills rather than those of an instructional designer or multimedia support specialist to create content for them, at least this has been my own reality as a community college faculty member (and not one that I think is effective by any means), the interactive content created with these visual tools is beautifully engaging and dynamic and easy to put together.

But, as is commonly the case, here is the predicament...flash is a technology that does not engage with a screen reader, an accessible technology that blind users rely upon to decipher the content that appears in the window of their web browser.

I found this stellar example of an educational example about modern art on Zoomorama which appears to be a collaboration between Adobe and Bridgeman Art. If I were teaching online, I would love to use this link as an online activity for my students to engage and leverage content about modern art.

Finally, I'm left envisioning a college classroom twenty years from now. If Prezi, Ahead and Zoomorama offer us tastes of the wave of online visual presentations online, how will we ensure the content our students are shared through academic presentations in the classroom break from the static, linear, text-driven model. The visual content in which we are immersed each day -- through the media, easy to access video on iPods and phones, YouTube sharing, web 2.0 editing, and now these dynamic presentation tools -- has created and continuous to retexture a new generation of visual learners.