With the launch of their Syllabus Tracker tool Utah State University is providing open access to all course syllabi through a functional and user-friendly dashboard.
The syllabi that instructors have already uploaded or created in Canvas are pulled into the tracker via the Canvas API.
Administrators and department heads at USU have been in search of a solution for the time consuming and frustrating task of gathering syllabi for all course offerings and providing student access to those syllabi.
The team in the Center for Innovative Design and Instruction (CIDI) at USU has stepped up to create a practical solution.
Kenneth Larsen, instructional developer for CIDI and creator of the Syllabus Tracker explains, “We wanted to create a tool that would facilitate access to course syllabi and display visual analytics on Canvas syllabi usage.”
John Louviere, director of CIDI defines his organization’s role as “empowering faculty to be successful teachers.” He adds, “Having a syllabus analytics tool provides our faculty sufficient incentive to format and share syllabi with students and the public.”
Louviere explains further that the CIDI instructional designers can use that course data to identify areas that they can assist faculty to improve course design and teaching strategies.
The Syllabus Tracker can filter results and “provides one convenient location for access to course syllabi,” explains Kim Corbin-Lewis, professor & department head of the Communicative Disorders & Deaf Education department at USU.
Corbin-Lewis continues to explain the access to updated and current syllabi for her entire department “helps meet a standard, part of the requirements set by the Council on Academic Accreditation of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association for the graduate programs in audiology and speech-language pathology.”
Administrators can use the analytics function to view all university courses in Canvas, or filter results by college, department, semester and/or instructor.
Dynamic graphs appear at the top as a visual analytics, and a list of all filtered courses are populated below. Each course that has a syllabus in Canvas includes a hyperlink to access the course syllabus directly.
Corbin-Lewis and the other department heads at USU will no longer have to spend time gathering all syllabi; they will simply need to verify that instructors are updating their syllabi in Canvas each semester.
To support faculty, Mr. Larsen and the team at CIDI also developed a custom tool to simplify the process of creating and editing syllabi in Canvas.
The syllabus tool has functionality based on the open source syllabus creator called SALSA (also developed at USU). The tool can insert the grading scheme set by instructors in the Canvas settings and can automatically load updated university policies and procedures.
Larsen explains, “Sections can be added, edited and rearranged to customize the syllabus for each instructor.”
He also points out that Bloom’s revised verbs and IDEA objectives are preloaded for instructors to insert directly into the learning outcomes section.
With access to course syllabi and analytics the Syllabus Tracker serves the needs of many groups on campus. By creating these powerful tools Louviere’s team at CIDI continues to empower faculty consistent with their mission.
An open source version of the Syllabus Tracker is being produced for use by other institutions using Canvas.
Travis Thurston is an Instructional Designer at Utah State University.
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