Creating an Online Syllabus

Putting your syllabus online is the first step in getting an entire course online. Having the syllabus online means that your students have access to their assignments anytime, anywhere. At Bryn Mawr, there are two places to put your syllabus online: in Blackboard or on the Bryn Mawr web site. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. We'll discuss both methods below.

Using the web for course materials

If you've never put anything on the web at Bryn Mawr before, you will need to establish a web account. To do so, e-mail the help desk and explain that you need an account for course pages. In most cases, your account will be located within your department site. You will be given a username and password (usually the same as your e-mail password) for your account and will be told where the directory for your account is located on the server. For more information about how this works, see the tip sheet on Unix or servers.

Once you have an account, you need to create the syllabus. You have many options. If you know how to write in html, you may simply use a text editor and code your entire syllabus that way. Most people, however, use an html editor, which allows you to type as you would in a word processor, but which generates a page that is readable by a web browser.

One of the simplest html editors is Netscape's composer, which is included with the browser. If you don't have Netscape, download it for free here. To open composer, click the icon at the bottom of the Netscape screen. You will then see a blank composer screen (This may look different on windows). You may begin typing just as you would in a word processor. The icons at the top of the page are very similar to the ones you would find in a word processor. They allow you to format your text, and add images and links. To learn more about creating web pages in Composer, see the tutorial page.

Once you have the syllabus created in Netscape, you will need to upload the page to the server. You can do this using and ftp (file transfer protocol) program like WS-FTP, Secure FTP (for Windows) or Fetch or the Terminal (for Macs).

Dreamweaver is another html editor that can be used to create a syllabus. It works much the same way that Netscape does, but has many more features and is capable of creating much more complex web pages. For more information, see our Dreamweaver page.

On to the Blackboard method.