Assignment Spotlight- Course Syllabus Activity

I'm not sure if you saw the recent video from Snoop Dogg instructing students to read their course Syllabus. If not, it's a nice short, sweet video that imparts the message that many college professors have been trying to get through to students for eons! In fact, there was a follow-up video that also went viral of a professor who created a Welcome video for his students incorporating the video that Snoop Dogg created. That's certainly one way to get your students to read their Course Syllabus. But here's another great idea...

I recently took a Professional Development course and one of the first activities we had to do was to annotate the Syllabus. I found this activity to be pretty motivating and it really drove me to read through the ENTIRE syllabus, which was fairly lengthy at 10 pages long. The Syllabus Activity was to annotate the Syllabus by identifying 3-5 important details, highlighting points or activities we were excited about and taking note of anything we had questions about.

I actually had fun doing this activity! Luckily, there were also a few exciting activities in the Syllabus that I found myself looking forward to! It made me wonder if there were any activities in my course that students get excited about on the first day of class. I told myself I would DEFINITELY be doing this activity in my own course.

To complete this activity, during the first synchronous class, we split into breakout groups and compared our notes. I could certainly see ways of replicating this in the online classroom as a small group discussion board activity or through the use of an Ed Tech Tool like Padlet.

What about you? Can you see yourself using an activity such as this? Share your thoughts, experiences and ideas in The Online Educator Facebook Group by clicking the link HERE. Also, as a treat don’t forget to GRAB YOUR FREE GUIDE to the 3 Secrets to Teaching Online Successfully.