Syllabi Central to launch on SU website

| Staff Reporter

Students who have “shopped” for classes in the past soon may get help.

Junior Joseph Marcus and senior Jake Novick, both Student Union senators, have been working on posting syllabi online during registration so that students can have more information about available courses.

Marcus and Novick created Syllabi Central, a private website hosted by Google, in spring 2009. They were forced to take down the website when the provost’s office informed them that posting Washington University’s copyrighted material onto a third-party website was illegal.

They have since worked with the eSyllabi task force, a group consisting of students, administrators and faculty, to try to put course syllabi online.

After failing to get the administration entirely on board intially, Marcus and Novick decided to work on their goal independently of the administration.

When it’s ready, the guide will be available through the SU website.

“This is the first time it’s on the Wash. U. server, and it’s 100 percent in our hands. It will be students working on it and students maintaining it,” Marcus said. “We want to have it up by spring registration time.”

According to Marcus, he and Novick got the idea of centralizing the syllabi online during Marcus’s freshman year.

“During registration freshman year, there are many intro-level classes with huge waiting lists that many people are interested in,” Marcus said. “We were hoping first to decrease the wait list and [second to] give students more information when they register for classes. Rather than relying on my friends, I can get something more objective to build a more ideal schedule for my interests.”

While some syllabi are online, many of them are scattered across various sites, such as departments’ websites or professors’ personal websites. Still others are unavailable until the course begins.

As chair of the Academic Affairs Committee, Marcus hopes to make the online centralization of syllabi a priority during the next semester. He and other senators are currently working on both contacting professors and finding a more efficient way to collect the syllabi in the future.

In order to gauge interest for Syllabi Central, SU distributed a survey in November asking students whether they wanted syllabi available during registration and whether having a syllabus two weeks before the beginning of the semester would be helpful. Of the 544 students polled, 97 percent responded “yes” to the first question, while 94 percent responded “yes” to the second one. On the question about how big of a priority syllabus availability should be to SU on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being a major priority, 73 percent rated the level of priority at 4 or 5.

“[Having the syllabi available] would give you a better idea about what the class is really like, because the descriptions of them online usually don’t do the class justice,” sophomore Elena Gittleman said.

Gittleman also echoed Marcus’s hopes about decreasing the amount of “shopping” for classes during the first few weeks of the semester.

“It would be easier for students and professors if there were fewer students adding and dropping the classes during the add/drop period,” she said.

Marcus is optimistic that the site will eventually get off the ground.

“[Novick] and I started off as renegade senators who decided we wanted to make a big impact quickly,” Marcus said. “We now see the big picture and where this fits in. We have more clearly defined goals and know that we need to build a strong base before we can move forward.”

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