On Monday, November 11, just in time for Spring course registration, VSG rolled out their continually promised and finally delivered online archive of course syllabi. The idea for posting course syllabi has been a campaign platform of VSG candidates since at least the Fall of 2005, yet every year, students have been left wondering when the promise would be delivered. Now, after a year and a half in the making, the course syllabi are online, but the current set up leaves little to be excited about.
The current set up began to take shape in the Spring of 2007 when then Senate Speaker Jared Anderson took his idea to the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education, Dr. Lucius Outlaw. While Anderson’s initial idea was for a VSG run website that could have been ready by the end of the semester, Outlaw pushed for using Blackboard as the site to host the syllabi. The catch to this, however, is that the program could take semesters to finally implement.
At this point (Fall 2007), VSG did what governments and corporations do best, form a task force to study the problem, specifically purchasing a costly upgrade to Blackboard that would allow students to use the site to view course syllabi. According to Anderson, the task force included him, “library officials, Cindy Franco, provost office officials and then-VSG President Cara Bilotta.”
After deciding to purchase the upgrade, it need to be installed and tested, taking more time and bringing us up to November 2008 when the system was finally made available to students.
Currently, according to Franco, there are 170 available syllabi, covering all four undergraduate schools. In addition, this number will increase as more professors sign on to the program.
During a particularly boring moment in a recent class, I took time to check out all of the available syllabi for the College of Arts and Sciences. Yeah, the class is that bad. I only searched the College of Arts and Sciences because this is the largest college in the Undergraduate school. Also, it’s the most spread out school, covering more majors than any other. This makes it harder to find classmates who have taken a specific course which would seem to make the online course syllabi archive most useful to Arts and Science students. Lastly, my class is only fifty minutes.
Going through the various departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, I was surprised by how few syllabi were actually available. I counted 80 syllabi that cover the Spring 2008 and Fall 2008 semesters, the only semesters in which courses would likely match professors and content of the course. What was more surpising than this though, was the distribution of syllabi between departments. Political Science is one of the most popular majors in the College of Arts and Sciences and yet it only has one syllabus posted. This is for PSCI 150, a course that is only offered every four years. Biology, on the other hand, had 15 syllabi posted.
Currently, professors are not required to post their syllabi on Blackboard. In addition, according to Anderson, the administration and faculty senate are not in favor of instituting a requirement to do so. As of now, it is up to the students to get professors to post their syllabi online which VSG President Joseph Williams noted, saying “We're trying to encourage faculty to buy into this program. We're also encouraging students to request professors to post syllabi.”
The system is currently in its infancy and so it is to be expected that it will take some time to get professors to sign on. Hopefully this program is just the start of an initiative that will gather steam in the coming semesters, maybe even before Fall course registration. In the mean time, what’s a few more semesters, when we’ve waited almost two years?
Ted Spangler is a senior at Vanderbilt University. He can be reached at ted.spangler@vanderbilt.edu
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