*Updating syllabi to reflect the coming semester’s actual meeting days and assignment due dates? Really, really boring. The boredom further propagates when it requires updating a kazillion webpages, then uploading the updates to your site (one at a time, since Fetch thinks it’s cute today to “lose” the connection when you use the feature that lets you set up the whole list of files to “Put” all at once). And don’t get me started on the tedium of undoing the MS Word crappy formatting when you turn your word document into a webpage. I’m guessing there would be buckets of money (plus rose petals and chocolates) for the developer who could provide the mutatis mutandi utility for syllabus and webpage updates.
*Jonah has already noted the post from Angry Professor about Large State University’s new business model budget. I want to add two small notes. First, I’d like to push Dean Dad’s OFR into common usage. Second, attend to Trystero’s observation that setting a “Year Zero” is the kind of thing you’d expect from people who end up with big stacks of human skulls in their offices. Noting this, I should confess that the tedium of updating syllabi has caused me to dream of calendar reform that would set September 1 as a particular day of the week (say, a Friday) every single year, without exception. This would make syllabi so much easier to keep current. (“We’d get out of sync with the Earth’s orbit around the Sun!” I hear you protest. Nope. With 52 nice, orderly weeks (364 day), we just need to tack on one or two “off the books” days at the end of the year, days that are no day of the week at all. Use ’em any way you want to.)
* And while I’m dancing on the edge of madness, is there any reason not to emulate this guy?
Only months after abandoning a tenured position at Lehigh University, maverick chemist Theodore Hapner managed to disprove two of the three laws of thermodynamics and show that gold is a noxious gas, turning the world of science–defined for centuries by exhaustive research, painstaking observation, and hard-won theories–completely on its head.
The brash chemist, who conducts independent research from his houseboat, has infuriated peers by refusing to “play by the rules of Socrates, Bacon, and Galileo,” calling test results as he sees them, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Oh wait, I remember why not …
*I need to give a belated shout-out to the excellent between-segments music guys at NPR’s Morning Edition. The “bumper” music they used the other morning at the end of the story about the IAU deciding to keep Pluto a planet was from the Planet of the Apes soundtrack. Genius!
*Speaking of Planet of the Apes, it’s one of the favorite movies of Kanzi, an extremely communicative bonobo. What I’d like to see? Kanzi chatting with Irene Pepperberg’s African gray parrot Alex.
The solution may be to not write your syllabus in MS word in the first place. Write it as a webpage, and make the design such that it looks good in printed format too.
Fine with me. My birthday’s on a Saturday every year if we go with 9/1 as a Friday.
You don’t edit the site with vi? It’s much better than MS Word.
I’m guessing there would be buckets of money (plus rose petals and chocolates) for the developer who could provide the mutatis mutandi utility for syllabus and webpage updates.
How about a syllabus blog? It could look like a static page, but the back end would be software with which you are already familiar (and you would never have to use Fetch again). Alternatively, Zoho offers an online spreadsheet, if that would be an easier format to use. I might have more ideas if you send me a link to the syllabus/pages in question, so I can see what the actual data you are working with looks like. (And by “I”, I mean my wife, who solves these sorts of problems for a living.)
Being not very good with anything to do with computers, and a little lazy also, I’m really glad I didn’t have to do all that work every semester with my online classes or with the online components of my on-campus courses.
With the software my school used, I just wrote my material in Word, saved each lesson document in Word as a web page, uploaded with a few clicks (and just as quickly and easily uploaded any internal photos or diagrams or other material for which my lesson contained links). I did content additions and revisions each semester by just clicking open the relevant file online, typing in my changes, and hitting save.
As for the date business, I clicked open the software’s online Calendar, clicked on a date, hit the drop menu listing all my lesson files, clicked on the day’s lesson, and then on to the next date and its lesson: about fifteen minutes for the whole semester’s dating for one class. There was no need to change dates on the webpages themselves, as the students accessed them through the Calendar links. Of course, if I took time on the Calendar to note holidays as well as classes, and also put in encouraging notes, and put test dates in red, etc., it certainly could take an hour to prepare the schedule in a class for the new semester.
Maybe your school should provide you with better software?
HEY! a question I actually have some competance to answer.
your university will be handsomely rewarded to model its little jungle of working documents [syllabi, course catalog, semester schedule, course sequence and credit sums for each degree requirement[as a function of year of matriculation],etc..pretty much the works as you know it] as a database. The DBA is fed by a cadre of IT savy reps from each college and department, one per department is more than enough, or she writes a really nice application to accept your little changes without taxing you to review their consistency….and requirement or prerequisite discrepancies fall out of the system as a QC by product. A mid sized application of PHP code could turn this DB [which should be distinct from but related to studend records database by shared keys] into the entire web-presentation. You, the developer of course content and judge of what prereqs are needed and of whether the content has been absorbed should have nothing more taxing to do than haggle with the the system when the course you want to teach conflicts with other courses you know your targeted student subset will also want to take.
[its the wine, I assure you.]
Must. Resist. Snarky. Comments.
Since I don’t know the content of the syllabi (can you post a link?) it’s hard to say if you need something fancy (i.e. a web page unto itself, with links and multimedia) or just a set of static documents. Either way, MSWORD is the worst way to make it.
Since you seem to be running a Mac (Fetch was the clue) I can suggest two quick fixes:
Cyberduck is a dependable, free ftp client: http://cyberduck.ch/
MSWord for Mac is better than the PC version; one reason is that one of the print options is to save the file as a PDF. Would that suffice for your syllabi, which could then be uploaded to a hosting departmental site with links to files the students are to download?
Cheers,
CAT~