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Tutorial
Creating a Collaborative Syllabus Using Moodle
2/27/2008
A "collaborative syllabus" is one in which the students have the ability to help determine the specifics of a course. Those specifics can be any element that a professor is willing to be flexible with (such items as the objectives, grading, attendance policies, types of assignments, and so on). The logic behind this tool is that by actively participating in the creation of the syllabus, students are able to signal what they want to learn and how they want to learn it and then (potentially) set the standard by which they will be accountable.An instrument that has been successfully used before, the collaborative syllabus suffered in one crucial area: It required too much class time to create it. Being unfamiliar with the concept, students first had to have it explained to them in one class period. Following that, there would be several sessions where they would discuss their thoughts, vote on what to incorporate/exclude, and edit the existing document. Given the constraints of the typical 15-week semester, every session is dear, and it is difficult to lose one to such a process, let alone three or four.
In pursuit of a better approach that saved class time, we at Anderson University turned to Moodle for an experiment. The more input students could have in the process outside of class, the more class time could be saved for covering the material. Given that, the creation of the collaborative syllabus was then approached in a three-step process. This article details the steps taken, and the results of walking through this process.
Step 1: Assessment of Students
Traditionally, a large number of students at Anderson University who take the eBusiness course in the fall then take the eCommerce course in the spring (the course for which the collaborative syllabus is being created). With four weeks to go before the end of the fall semester, students in the eBusiness course were asked to access the ATTLS survey in Moodle and answer the questions asked as openly and honestly as possible.
The Attitudes Toward Thinking and Learning (ATTLS) survey was developed to identify "connected" and "separate" learning styles (Galotti, 1999). According to the authors of the survey instrument, "Separate knowing ... involves objective, analytical, detached evaluation of an argument or piece of work", while "Connected knowers look for why it makes sense, how it might be right"; they "... look at things from the other's point of view, in the other's own terms, and try first to understand the other's point of view rather than evaluate it." (Galotti)
Moodle includes the ability to administer this instrument utilizing a 20-question, five-point Likert scale as shown below.
Verbally, the students were told that although Moodle records who accesses each element, that information would not be examined, and every survey would be considered anonymous. Within the survey, the information relayed to them prior to starting it was as follows:
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