CTL Blog

New Syllabus Tool in CoursePlus is Live!

March 18, 2013 | 2 Minute Read

The new syllabus tool in CoursePlus is now live. You can read more about what's new in the syllabus tool in this blog post.

At the last minute, the CoursePlus team did a little work to save faculty some time when reviewing and touching up their syllabus in this new format. Any of the information from the "Additional Faculty Notes" sections of the Course Description, Methods of Assessment, Intended Audience and Prerequisites fields from the old version of the syllabus have been appended into a single section with the official information from the JHSPH Course Catalog database. This means that instead of having to manually merge these sections of content this work has been done for you. The Course Learning Objectives section still has one section for what came from the JHSPH Course Catalog database and another that contains any additional objectives that were in the "Additional Faculty Notes" section in the old syllabus. You should definitely review that material and combine them into a single section.

We have also been asked about the "Files from the Online Library" section and the "Course Schedule" section — both of which appear on the faculty/editor view of the syllabus and both of which cannot be deleted. Both sections are, essentially, placeholders.

In the case of the "Files from the Online Library" section, this section will populate with any files that you flag in the Online Library as being for display on the syllabus. If there are no files in this section, this section is not displayed on the student or printable views of the syllabus. (Remember that the syllabus is public. If you make any files available for download from the syllabus page, they absolutely must be free of any copyright. The concept of "fair use" does not apply in this case.)

The "Course Schedule" section is a placeholder that does two things: on the Web-based, public view of the syllabus, a link to the class sessions page is displayed. On the printable version of the syllabus, any information from the class sessions page is inserted into the printout of the syllabus at that point. The inclusion of the class sessions (or schedule) is an important part of creating syllabi for accreditation, so that is why this section is always included.

As we've mentioned before, if you have questions or run into problems with the syllabus tool, please contact the CTLT Help team. They're quite responsive, and will gladly help work through any issues you may have.