The promise is as familiar as that of a milkshake machine at New South. For years Georgetown University Student Association candidates have been plastering the walls of our dorms with the pledge to create mandatory University-wide online syllabi for classes. Although the posting of class book lists and the creation of an online add/drop system are notable achievements, there has been no similar success with syllabi.
According to University Registrar John Q. Pierce, there is no institutional policy requiring professors to upload their syllabi online. Currently, putting syllabi on the web is a departmental or individual decision. To their credit, some departments, such as sociology, already provide syllabi online for some classes. In addition, GUSA president Kaydee Bridges (SFS, ‘03), hopes to have some form of uniform online syllabi system available for pre-registration in the spring. According to Bridges, professors’ online syllabi would take one of three forms: a syllabus from the last time they taught the class, which she identifies as the most likely option; a paragraph describing the content of the class; or the actual syllabus for the spring, the most useful but least likely option.
Recently, University Information Services created the technical framework to allow professors to easily upload their syllabi to the web, Bridges said. Unfortunately, even with this foundation in place, there is no plan to make the online posting of syllabi mandatory. Before pre-registration, Bridges will send out e-mails and letters to professors asking them to post their syllabi through the UIS system, but it will not be obligatory.
Pierce feels that forcing professors to upload their syllabi would be “counter-productive” at this point and that technical and copyright issues need to be resolved first. However, with a UIS system in place, posting syllabi should be simple enough for professors to complete correctly. Students have been clamoring for mandatory online syllabi for years, and the administration has run out of excuses for not providing them.
