February 18, 2020

The unexpected benefits of a shorter syllabus

By Jackie Amsden

Hannah McGregor is an assistant professor in Publishing@SFU. Her decision to reformat her course syllabus as a zine had surprising consequences.

In January 2020, Hannah McGregor reinvented the syllabus for PUB 448: Publishing and Social Change: Tech, Texts, and Revolution by formatting it as a zine, a self-published, often handmade publication popular among fringe subcultures like DIY punk and the riot grrrl movement.

McGregor, an assistant professor in Publishing@SFU, condensed her normally six-page syllabus into one double-sided page, folded over to resemble a booklet. To honour the zine aesthetic, she hand-wrote all of the content with a black Sharpie marker.

“Students are used to seeing very long and dense syllabi formatted in a very institutionalized and standardized way. They are so repetitive and so overwhelming that students don’t even read them. They just give them a skim and turn away.”

“IT WAS GREAT TO SEE [STUDENTS] ACTUALLY READ THE WHOLE SYLLABUS. AND BECAUSE NOT ALL THE INFORMATION WAS WRITTEN ON IT, THE STUDENTS ASKED WAY MORE QUESTIONS.”

McGregor explains that the new format fostered a richer student discussion around the course outline and objectives.

“It was great to see them actually read the whole syllabus. And because not all of the information was written on it, the students asked way more questions. I think the fundamentally too-short syllabus really gets the conversation going.” 

McGregor also notes that the challenge of reducing her syllabus so dramatically forced her to refine the course design.

“What I didn’t anticipate was how incredibly hard it would be to fit all of the information about the course onto a single piece of paper, so I had to really rethink what do I actually need them to know? What is actually key? I ended up simplifying the assignment structure for the course because I couldn’t fit the entire assignment in the zine, which made the whole course way more straightforward for students.”

And while she isn’t sure if she will be picking up a Sharpie next semester, the experience has given her new insight into the role of innovation in the classroom. 

“It reminded me that every element of the course can be rethought and that I need to resist the urge to think I know how everything should look.”

Want to see other examples of how faculty across Canada and the U.S. are experimenting with communicating course expectations to their students in creative and visual ways?  Take a look at a few examples: 

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Teaching Practice, Course and Curriculum Planning