No More Syllabus

Warning -- soap box!

I'm the Academic Dean for Colorado Community Colleges Online and in that role I often play referee between faculty and students. Far too often the dispute is around the acceptance of late work and the inability of all learners to meet all deadlines. I'm in the community college world, so most of our learners are adults with jobs, families, crises, and many activities with many levels of importance in their lives. As faculty (because I wear that hat also) our goal is to help the learner meet a set of learning outcomes with respect to our field. In our interaction with the learner that is actually our only official goal.

Learners are taking our classes with the goal of meeting those same learning outcomes.

The problem comes when meeting the class schedule becomes the primary learning outcome and when the learner's grade reflects, not her understanding of the course material, but rather her ability to complete all required course activities on time.

Faculty have some rights in this debate of course -- they are also adults who need to have some control over their own schedule and they also need a way to evaluate the learner's understanding of the material. In most educational settings however, the faculty appears to have all of the rights, all control over the course schedule, assessment schedule and type. How much better and exciting would education be if some of this control was ceded to the learner?

For a much better post on this topic read Tomorrow's Professor on Death to the Syllabus - http://amps-tools.mit.edu/tomprofblog/archives/2007/11/834_death_to_th.html#more.

A solution discussed in that post and in many other books (Learner Centered Teaching by MaryEllen Weimer for example) and articles is a jointly developed syllabus where learners help develop the activities by which they will be assessed. Another solution is a more traditional syllabus but with flexibility in assignments built in, from something as straight-forward as allowing learners to take 5 out of 7 exams (they choose which ones to drop) to a more complex set of assignments of which learners choose a certain number from several categories.

Ideas such as these will help keep learners engaged in the course while alleviating the conflict between measuring learning outcomes and measuring learners' ability to meet fixed schedules.

Lisa