Syllabus Management Tool Feedback

[JamesSekcienski]

We are preparing to adopt a syllabus management tool and wanted to know if anyone else is willing to share what tools/processes they are using to manage syllabi across their college/university and/or feedback about your experience with the tools/processes.  We know Simple Syllabus is one of the Instructure partners and there are some other tools/companies that aren't currently Instructure partners.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @JamesSekcienski ...

We use Simple Syllabus at our College.  I'm still pretty new to my position there (I started on 9/11/23), and so I feel that I am still learning how SS works.  But, we have a general template set up which has some areas that are not editable by the instructor (since it's standard information for all courses), but other parts are editable (such as office hours, for example).  You can set up different roles for people within SS ... similar to the kinds of roles you would be able to set up in Canvas as an administrator.  We also try to mirror our sub-account structure in Canvas with something similar in SS.  The syllabi from SS copy over from semester to semester, so that is a nice feature for our faculty.

Have you reached out to Simple Syllabus to get a demo of their product?  That's what I'd recommend if you wanted to learn more about it.

I feel like I've given you random thoughts on my experiences thus far with SS, but hopefully some of this would be helpful for you.

[JamesSekcienski]

@Chris_Hofer 

Thank you for sharing about your experience with Simple Syllabus so far.  The ability to lock certain content in all syllabi is one of the main features we are looking for to make it easier to update when there are policy changes. That is good to know about being able to set-up different types of admin roles in Simple Syllabus.  We are planning on trying out Simple Syllabus to see how it works first-hand.

Is there anything about Simple Syllabus that surprised you or that new users/admins should be aware of that they may not realize at first?

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @JamesSekcienski ...

Is there anything about Simple Syllabus that surprised you or that new users/admins should be aware of that they may not realize at first?

---

Hmmm...that's a great question!  Let's see...

• They have a self-guided tutorial (something like 12-14 modules) that you can go through.  If you score at least 80% on their quiz at the end, you get a certificate that you're a certified Simple Syllabus administrator.  (I just recently completed this.)
• They have a small "Community" space where people can ask questions...sort of like right here in the Canvas Community...but just not as large and maybe not as active.
• Their support team is very responsive.  I've submitted several questions to them, and often I get a response in less than 15 minutes...which is awesome!
• They just recently upgraded everyone to their new admin view, so that's taken a little bit of learning to get used to because some things moved around...but the main functionality is the same.
• There's some pretty good reporting tools you can use to get information that would help you and your team.
• You can connect it to Google Analytics...though I'm not exactly sure what kinds of data from SS it would be passing along to GA.
• I think one of the main challenges I had (and still have to some extent) is getting a grasp on how our departments are set up in SS, and how the different roles people have can affect content within SS.  That's probably going to be your biggest challenge.  But again, SS support is really good, and they'll help you along the way if you have questions.
• Not sure what SIS (Student Information System) you have, but we have Colleague, and we work with someone from our ITS team to make sure that courses and users from that SIS are in Simple Syllabus.

Does this help at all?  Good luck!

[JamesSekcienski]

@Chris_Hofer 

Thank you for sharing!  That is nice to know about the tutorial and community space.  It is also great to hear that you have a positive experience with their support team and that they are responsive.

Thank you for the heads up about the departments.  We will be sure to keep that in mind with planning if we get Simple Syllabus.

We would also work with our IT team for any SIS integration aspects too.

[johnod120]

@JamesSekcienski 

We've been using Simple Syllabus for about 2 years now.  It's not compulsory, so we usually only have about 100 syllabi in the system each semester, it's usually the new faculty that are using it as we pitch it to them at their orientation and they appreciate that it gathers a lot of the institutional policy language for them, and we have it bring over the data from their previous syllabus each semester so they usually only have to make a few updates.  

Overall I'd say it's fairly positive feedback from those that use it

Like @Chris_Hofer said you can setup your template so some parts are editable and others aren't.  The tricky thing we've found is if we've left a component editable that also contains some of our standard policy language and need to update that policy language, if they have actually made edits on their individual syllabus, their edits win out over any changes to the template and the new language wouldn't be added to theirs.  An example of this is our component for Resources on Mental Health: we have added our on-campus resources to the component but also allowed them to edit it if they choose, so if we ever need to update our info for that component, we need to enable a check box that says "ignore previous content" so it will get those changes, but by doing that we force them to have to manually add their own edits again, and then there's the decision for how long to leave that "ignore previous content" check box enabled: if we do leave it on for too long we keep making them manually make edits and too short they won't get the updated College information.  So I would just think carefully about what components you want to allow them to edit.

Another issue we've found is if an instructor cross-lists their sections, they need to change the permissions for the syllabus in Simple to allow the moved sections to be able to view it, though there is a setting in the LTI 1.3 connection that can auto-provision the user to have access to a syllabus if they've accessed it via a Canvas course.  They'd probably set you up with the LTI 1.3 from the start so just ask about the auto-provision setting if your instructors like to cross-list.

I will also say their support has been really good the few times I've had to reach out: extremely fast response time!  And the ability to quickly download all syllabi from a given semester is very handy.

Hope that helps!

~JOD

[JamesSekcienski]

@johnod120 

Thank you for sharing about your experience with Simple Syllabus too!  That is interesting that it isn't required for all teachers to use, but glad to hear it has been mostly positive feedback from those that have used it so far.

Thank you for the warning about the editable content.  That is definitely important to keep in mind about potential editable placeholder content that they may want to include.

We do have some cross-listing to worry about based primarily on what it states in our SIS.  We have almost no cross-listing that isn't listed in our SIS.  Since students would primarily access through Canvas, that is good to know that the LTI should handle their access automatically.

I'm also glad to hear another positive comment about their support!

[johnod120]

If your cross-listing is in your SIS I imagine you'll be fine.  Ours are mostly done manually in Canvas by faculty teaching multiple sections of the same course and just want to simplify things.