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Carefully constructed syllabi and online courses provide students with a road map for learning and communicate both our respect for them and our desire to see them succeed.

Although few of us may know the term syllabus derives from the Greek word for book label, faculty tend to have strong opinions about the document. From the meme-status “It’s on the syllabus” sentiment to frustrations with required statements and policies, the syllabus is ubiquitous for faculty. As it relates to teaching and learning, the syllabus can be said to enact one’s theory of teaching.¹ It also includes core pedagogical features such as learning objectives and assessments and can serve as a learning guide for students. Meanwhile, scholars and practitioners of inclusive teaching have identified the syllabus as an important tool through which faculty can advance equity. They describe syllabus refinement as an important and concrete step that faculty can take to turn their inclusive commitments into action.

The syllabus is often the locus of institutional requirements, whether regarding the use of a syllabus template or the inclusion of specific testing policies, academic integrity statements, and procedures for students with disabilities. Some institutions provide templates for instructors to use partly for the purpose of ensuring their requirements are met. In this way, the document represents a “relatively unexamined battleground” between institutional expectations and faculty members’ preferences and commitments, suggest James Dyer and colleagues.² Their analysis uses the example of language expectations to demonstrate that equity-minded faculty may want to “uphold students’ rich cultural and linguistic experiences” yet can be constrained by their college’s requirements on language norms. Later, we’ll revisit their study and suggestions, and we’ll also provide recommendations for faculty who are expected to use an existing syllabus or online course.

In the case of fully online courses, we find significant parallels between the influence of the course syllabus on student learning and that of the design of an asynchronous online course. Indeed, we argue that an online course’s design can conceivably impact students’ ability to persist, learn, and succeed even more than a syllabus for an in-person class, because students must immerse themselves in the online environment every time they go to class. An in-person classroom can promote or hinder learning through structures and features such as the size of the room or lecture hall, visibility of projection screens and whiteboards, quality of the audio in the room, the mobility (or not) of furniture such as student desks and chairs, and so on. Online courses have corresponding features: the strengths and limitations of platforms such as Canvas, D2L, or Blackboard; the way the course has been organized given the available structures; the placement of module materials and activities; and the availability of navigational guidance (such as, “Click the link below to access the assignment instructions and submission area”). Each feature can serve to foster—or restrict—students’ ability to progress without causing them to waste precious cognitive resources on the logistics of completing coursework.

Unlike a physical classroom, an online course contains all instructional materials, activities, assessments, policies, and, typically, interaction with other students and with you, the instructor. How well the online course has been designed therefore has a significant impact on student learning and success. And in our combined decades of experience teaching online and supporting online educators, we’ve found that many dedicated and well-meaning online faculty members simply haven’t been offered the adequate time and professional development they need to accurately discern whether their course design—either provided or self-created—advances equity. Also, as can be the case with syllabi, your college or department may mandate your use of an institutionally or departmentally approved online course. There may be elements of this predetermined content, including course materials, activities, assessments, layout, navigation, and support structures (such as embedded links to the library or tutoring office), that align to greater or lesser extent with your equity-minded values, perspectives, and goals.

Because online courses present these unique challenges, in this unit we will devote specialized consideration to equity-focused online course design recommendations in addition to our review of the research and practical suggestions related to course syllabi. (We’ll provide even more guidance on how online course design can facilitate effective learning in Section Two, focused on day-to-day teaching.) This unit begins with a brief overview of research on the syllabus and inclusive syllabi because this guiding document sets the tone for classes in all modalities. We will then describe the final stage of L. Dee Fink’s course design model: putting it all together, including the identification of course materials, with focused considerations for asynchronous online course design. The closing segment of this unit offers suggestions for each primary syllabus section—from the office hour listing to the course schedule—as well as for overall tone.