Constructing Your Syllabus

Gather the information

Now that you have decided what you are going to do and the order in which you are going to do it, you are prepared to build the syllabus. This document acts as a guide to the students to let them know your expectations. The Wayland syllabus must include several elements, as specified in the academic catalog, and may include several others. You have already written out much of this. I will provide here a couple of required elements so that you can easily copy and paste these into your syllabus. Plug them into a Word ©, Notepad ©, or HTML document and add your own elements.

Disability statement:
It is university policy that no otherwise qualified disabled person be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subject to discrimination under any educational program or activity in the University.

Attendance requirements
Students enrolled in the University’s Virtual Campus should make every effort to participate fully in the class. In order to make up incomplete work, the student must explain the reason for the deficiency to the instructor, who will then determine whether the omitted work may be made up. When a student shows a lack of participation considered by the instructor to be excessive, the instructor will so advise the student. Any student who misses 25 percent or more of the class assignments will receive a grade of F in the course. Additional participation policies for each course, as defined by the instructor in the course syllabus, are considered a part of the University’s attendance policy.

Organize the syllabus

After you have published your syllabus in Blackboard, students will only be able to view the top portion of the document when they open it. For that reason, it will be very helpful to students for you to provide a menu or navigation bar at the top of your syllabus. If you do not know how to do this in Word, click on this link. You can see an example of this technique by clicking this link. (This will open a Word document in a separate window. You can use this syllabus as a pattern for your own if you wish by saving to your computer. Alternately, you can right-click on the link and choose "Save target as" to save it to your computer. Once you have saved the document to your computer, you can edit as needed.) However you organize your syllabus, remember that it needs to be explicit. If you do not want to have 25 extra emails asking how much the mid-term counts, be sure to state it clearly in your syllabus.