Printable/PDF Syllabus

(1)
This idea was originally posted by Donal Thomas in Community 1.0!

 

Have a print button on the syllabus page for those students that would like to have a hard copy of the syllabus.

 

There are additional use cases for a printable or downloadable PDF when an instructor uses the Syllabus Wiki space to develop their wiki.

  1. For Accreditation, colleges are required to keep a record database of their course syllabi.  Instructors are often asked to save their syllabus in PDF form and provide it to the keeper of the database.  The workaround for faculty now is to copy the wiki content, paste it into a document, save it as a pdf and then send it on.  Retained formatting can be an issue!
  2. Many students still like a paper copy of their syllabus.  Sometimes highlighting the wiki content and then printing selection will give students a printed version, but it is not consistent.
  3. When students transfer colleges and transfer credits they (or the transfer institution) will sometimes need to provide a syllabus of their completed courses in order to receive credit for a specific course.  A syllabus in a wiki page cannot be easily shared or sent to another institiion.

 

In the meantime there are a few workarounds that instructors have figured out!

  • Instructors use a Google Doc and provide the share link in their course.  This link can then be shared and the document can be downloaded by users as needed.
  • Instructors will upload a PDF, Word, or other document into the wiki space.  However, any adjustments to the document requires another upload of the updated document - and many instructors get frustrated by the 5-6+ syllabus documents they accrue in their files.
  • Instructors are also finding other creative ways to create syllabi.  As Mary Kavanaugh mentioned in her post (quoted below) there is a shift to rethink the syllabus.  Here (Creative Approaches to the Syllabus – ProfHacker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education) is a very interesting blog post that inspired me to rethink my own syllabus and make it much more visual and then embed it into the wiki page.  Its then printable and downloadable!  https://magic.piktochart.com/output/4004248-untitled-infographic 

It would be nice to have a print button on syllabus page, however, as we teach faculty to follow the new paradigm of not putting 7-20 pages

of a syllabus in pdf form but rather to use the Syllabus wiki

and other wiki pages to conntect content we have discovered a problem ....

department heads, deans, etc are still requiring a copy of the syllabus be

submitted to them. When faculty were using Blackboard Vista and had PDFs

of everything that wasn't a problem but now it will require going into

Canvas pages and copying and pasting all related material to a word doc.

Is there anything on the horizon to create a tool to extract that

information to one digital form?

 

 

Comment from Instructure

Comment from Cosme Salazar

Thank you David Lyons for describing the workflow for printing the syllabus. It seems like using CTRL-P/CMD-P or File > Print is an easy way to print the syllabus description field and the table with the course assignments and dates.

23 Comments
rpuskarcik
Community Novice

This is very similar to a proposal I made in Sept. 2018, only I suggested the conversion to pdf. That way it could be printed, or sent as a file. Please visit and vote.

dlyons
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Are you sure? I do this all the time, and even tested it just now and it definitely printed the entire document and not just what was visible on screen. Perhaps you're thinking of "Print Screen" on Windows which takes a screenshot?

scott_wahl
Community Member

It would be great if the syllabus could be printed to show all notes. This could then be either printed and distributed to students or they could do it themselves. A work around I have found is to import to Outlook and print from there using the detailed information setting but this is more complicated to do, requires Outlook etc.