Taking some inspiration from a ProfHacker blog post on doing an “extreme makeover” for syllabi, I worked with hari stephen kumar on a variety of design methods for both syllabi and assignment sheets for our own College Writing courses. Our changes included playing with layout, adding images and visual metaphors, incorporating color, and in hari’s case, making a syllabus interactive with HTML5. The results were gratifying: students remarked that our design decisions motivated them to actually read the entire syllabus word-for-word. We also found that were using our syllabi on a regular basis and referred back to them at various points during the semester.
