This website is dedicated to helping instructors build a syllabus that plans for diverse student abilities and promotes an atmosphere in which students feel comfortable discussing their unique abilities. Countless instructors complain that students don’t read the syllabus. We believe students would use the document more effectively if it were designed more accessibly.
Accessibility is necessary for all learning, and disability studies provides a key lens through which to question our classroom practices and resources. To create more inclusive teaching, instructors must plan for diversity in the classroom and adapt to the immediate needs of students.
Type of Material:
Reference Material
Recommended Uses:
Professional development, pre-service and in-service education courses; for faculty use at all levels where a syllabus is used.
Technical Requirements:
All content is accessible and graphics have alternate text.
Identify Major Learning Goals:
* To help educators examine syllabi for all types of accessibility
* To provide resources for educators who wish to make their syllabi more student-friendly
* To help educators create a more democratic classroom.
Target Student Population:
Educators at all levels; pre-service teachers and education courses; faculty helping students create syllabi and teachers who hope to improve the accessibility of their syllabi.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:
None
Content Quality
Rating:
Strengths:
The site provides ideas and resources to enable educators to make their syllabi usable and student-friendly. The examples are striking and provide users with the opportunity to re-examine traditional syllabi.
The author welcomes input from users. The site itself demonstrates the concepts it teaches. This content is very important as more and more teachers put their syllabi online. Many students do not read their class syllabus, but if the guidelines here are followed, the syllabus may encourage more students to read it and thus be more successful in their classes.
Concerns:
None.
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Rating:
Strengths:
As educators we tend to reuse syllabi, changing dates each term. This site invites educators to re-examine what they have done in the past and look at the way syllabi are viewed by students. It includes both disability accessibility and helpful examples of ways in which educators can make syllabi more useful to all students.
There are sites online that discuss ADA, but this site is targeted specifically to syllabus creation and gives examples of what to do and also what not to do.
Concerns:
None.
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
Rating:
Strengths:
Very easy to use. Material is categorized and there is also a resources section with links to other resources that can be useful in a syllabus revision. The site opens with graphics that have links to the material. There are also accessible syllabi created by teachers who have viewed this site and created their own.
Concerns:
None.
Other Issues and Comments:
It's great to have all this material in one place, developed by an educational institution.
Creative Commons:
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