What services do you offer?
The Syllabus Doctor designs syllabi and assignment/assessment design for university and college courses, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. We can help you:
- Design new syllabi.
- Improve accessibility of existing syllabi (for both learners and instructors).
- Make courses more student-centred.
- Improve workload manageability (for both learners and instructors).
- Redesign a course to resolve a particular problem.
- Design or re-design assessments to meet pedagogical goals.
- More effectively utilize available LMS and other e-learning resources.
- Improve work-life balance through planning and time-management.
- Serve as an outside resource – because sometimes two heads are better than one.
Throughout the process, the course remains your course. The Syllabus Doctor won’t write lectures or course content. The Syllabus Doctor will design or help you to design assessments that meet your needs, but won’t write your quiz/essay/exam questions for you. Sometimes, an accessible and flexible assignment might not need pre-written questions, and might invite students to respond to a more general prompt. In that case, your students will provide the course-relevant content to the assignment or assessment.
What is your approach to learning?
The student-centered learning philosophy of the Syllabus Doctor aligns with a cognitivist or constructivist model of learning. A cognitivist theory of learning understands learning to be a psychological process of knowledge formation involving tasks such as thinking, problem solving, and concept formation. Constructivism as a theory of learning understands learning to be a process of building meaning from experience. In learning design, these approaches taken together imply that the student’s experience is fundamental to the possibility of learning. Student learning can be built on a well-scaffolded foundation of experiences in the course (cognitivist), and built connections between the course and other experiences (constructivist).
Indeed, within philosophy and the humanities, there is a strong objection to the rival behaviorist model of learning and assessment, which understand learning to occur wherever a change in stimulus-response can be curated. These objections to behaviorism and acceptance of cognitive or constructivist theories are exemplified in a pattern of humanities instructors choosing learning objectives focused on skills at the top end of Bloom’s taxonomy such as analysis and evaluation, and in dismissals of assessments of recall or skills at the low end of Bloom’s taxonomy.
The Syllabus Doctor’s focus on flexible, accessible design and personalized learning pathways aligns particularly well with a constructivist philosophy of learning encouraging learners to build their own meaning within the frame of a course or assignment. However, the constructivist emphasis on building connections, original examples, and finding personal meaning can result in greater cognitive load for the learners. (Not to mention significant cognitive load for instructor or marker.) In order to plan for a balanced cognitive load throughout a university course, the Syllabus Doctor uses scaffolded assignments starting from cognitivist foundations of understanding and application and building towards creative and analytic understandings involving skills at the higher end of Bloom’s taxonomy. This blended and balanced cognitivist and constructivist philosophy fits particularly well within the discipline of philosophy, which is a realm of ill-defined problems admitting of more than one solution.
What is UDL?
Universal Design is a principle of designing for all possible end users. When you design a sidewalk or a computer or a light switch, you don’t know what abilities or accessibility needs your end users may have, so UD advocates for designing curb cuts, text to speech software, and to put light switches at a prescribed height as a matter of course. Universal Design tries to design for as wide a range of possible end users as possible, ideally all possible end users.
Universal Design for Learning applies this principle to an educational context, and attempts to design learning programs for all possible abilities and accessibility needs. In a university context, a class list is typically not finalized until the course is underway as students add and drop classes for the first couple of weeks of the semester, and student accommodation requests might not come until a few weeks after that. Student accommodations are typically handled as exceptions to the syllabus after the fact, and rely on individual requests to be accommodated. Relying on student requests for accommodations is problematic in a number of ways: it puts the onus on students to make disclosures to the university and to make individual accommodation requests, and it is typically only available for students who experience barriers to education within a narrow paradigm of diagnosed and documented accommodation needs. So, the student whose parent broke their hip the week before classes started, or the student who is working full time hours at a part time job to support their family, or the student whose child is home sick from daycare will not have access to the university-certified accommodations that would help them be successful in class. UDL advocates that flexibility and choice be built into the syllabus and assignment design so that students can succeed in the course whatever their circumstances may be. After all, every student has been admitted to the university and the course on the basis of their previous record of success in relevant pre-requisites. UDL offers them the chance to fulfill that potential.
What are your rates?
Our hourly rate is $50. Prices range from $50 for a brief consultation plus follow-up report to $3000 for a full syllabus design. Inquire for a quote at info@syllabusdoctor.com .