Simple Syllabus
Richland has adopted a syllabus management system called Simple Syllabus. Simple Syllabus brings many benefits to instructors, including automatically keeping the portions of your syllabus featuring college-wide information up to date. Students and instructors will access their syllabi via a "Simple Syllabus" navigational link in their Canvas courses.
Getting Started with Simple Syllabus
The following directions are for faculty who have never used Simple Syllabus or who are building the syllabus for a course for the first time.
Directions:
- Go to the "Simple Syllabus" navigational link (on the left-hand side) within each of your Canvas courses and add/update the information within any of the boxes that are marked as "Required." Much of the information can be copied from a previous syllabus and pasted into Simple Syllabus.
- Note: If an open box is NOT marked as "Required" and you are not adding information to it, then you need to click the toggle to make the box not visible to students. If the box is left visible and is blank, that is very confusing for students.
- Once you have finished adding/updating all the information within Simple Syllabus, ensure the information is made visible to students by clicking "Submit" at the bottom.
- Note: Your syllabus will NOT be available to students until you click the Submit button.
- If you cannot click Submit, that means you have not added information in all required boxes. Simple Syllabus will provide links to the required sections that need to be completed. Once you have completed these requirements, scroll back down and make sure to click the "Submit" button.
- You will also want to hide the regular "Syllabus" navigational link within your Canvas course(s) so that only the "Simple Syllabus" link remains for students to access. You can do this by going to course Settings and the Navigation tab and disabling the Syllabus link Links to an external site..
Here is a "Getting Started with Simple Syllabus" video that demonstrates exactly how to perform each of the aforementioned steps.
Copying with Simple Syllabus
The following directions are for faculty who have already used Simple Syllabus for a course and would like to copy their Syllabus from one course into another course.
Example 1: Copying a previous semester syllabus into a new semester (Ex: Summer Math 113 syllabus into a Fall Math 113 syllabus).
Example 2: Copying a current semester syllabus into the same semester (Ex: Fall COMM 101-V1 into Fall COMM 101-V2). This option would be used if a faculty member taught more than one section of the same course for a given semester.
Directions:
- Go to the "Simple Syllabus" navigational link (on the left-hand side) within each of your Canvas courses and select the "Replace with a different syllabus" option. For Semester, pick the semester of the syllabus you would like to copy. In the Search box, type in the course prefix/course number. Double-check that you have the correct semester and course, and then click on the name of the course you would like to copy the syllabus from. This will start the syllabus copy.
- Note: If you accidentally copy over the wrong course, you can click the "Reset" icon to reset the syllabi back to its original blank format. You can then copy over the correct syllabi.
- Once your syllabus has been copied, add/update the information within any of the boxes as needed.
- Note: If an open box is NOT marked as "Required" and you are not adding information to it, then you need to click the toggle to make the box not visible to students. If the box is left visible and is blank, that is very confusing for students.
- Once you have finished adding/updating all the information within Simple Syllabus, ensure the information is made visible to students by clicking "Submit" at the bottom.
- Note: Your syllabus will NOT be available to students until you click the Submit button.
- If you cannot click Submit, that means you have not added information in all required boxes. Simple Syllabus will provide links to the required sections that need to be completed. Once you have completed these requirements, scroll back down and make sure to click the "Submit" button.
- You will also want to hide the regular "Syllabus" navigational link within your Canvas course(s) so that only the "Simple Syllabus" link remains for students to access. You can do this by going to course Settings and the Navigation tab and disabling the Syllabus link Links to an external site..
Here is a "Copying Simple Syllabi" video that demonstrates exactly how to perform each of the aforementioned steps.
Beginning of the Semester Reminders
The following video is a quick walk-through of some important things to check related to Simple Syllabus before the start of the semester. It also includes a few quick reminders about some cool features!