Where did all the syllabi go?

The Dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh, a campus of 11,000 on the other side of the state from us, recently told professors that — for financial and educational reasons — they should put their syllabi online, and stop distributing them on the first day of classes. The university is so cash poor that the College of Letters and Science's $18.5 million annual budget is less than when the dean began fourteen years ago! See the story here.

Supporters say that that it's better to put syllabi and other course materials online where they can never be lost and where students can always access them; opponents argue that students need paper copies that they can carry with them and that it is especially important pedagogically to hand out paper copies of syllabi on the first day of class so that course requirements can be reviewed and clarified together.

I tend to fall into the latter camp. This is a living document, a contract between student and the professor. Yet there is also great merit in placing syllabi on-line. Particularily for public universities,as public concern about what really happens in college classrooms increases, online syllabi stand to become key documents in a debate that is hindered by an overall lack of documentation about how college teachers actually use their classrooms.