Speaker 1: Hello, this quick video is on the Harper Syllabus Template. It's all about sharing very important information. My name is Jenny Henrickson and I work in the Academy for Teaching Excellence at Harper College.

Speaker 2: Passengers, welcome aboard flight 1200, destination Palatine, Illinois. As we prepare for takeoff, please allow me to direct your attention to some very important information.

Speaker 1: You may be familiar with this scene, right, looking down the aisle of a flight cabin as you listen to the safety announcements begin. You may hear some reminders about seatbelt signs and about emergency exits. It's important for the flight attendants to share this information with us. So they might share this information through jokes or through songs. The airlines might create some very creative videos. They might simply have you watch them and then look at the laminated pamphlets that they provide. And we, the passengers, you know, we might be thinking that, oh, we've already heard this information. We can figure it out later if we need to. Maybe we're really anxious about the flight or about our trip and so it's very difficult to pay attention. Perhaps we're exhausted and that's why it's difficult for us. But the safety information needs to be spelled out for the well-being of everyone on the plane. We need to listen and we need to watch. They need our attention. Similarly, at the start of your class's journey, you have something very important to share with your students for their well-being during the course. And this is the course syllabus. So your students might have barriers to paying attention as well when you share your syllabus information. So your students might be thinking, similar to passengers, that they know it already or they'll figure it out when they need to. Maybe they're too anxious or too tired. So you need to spell it out clearly. So we have created, the Academy has created a website with some syllabus resources. And it's located here on the Academy website under Resources. The address is harper-academy.net backslash resources backslash syllabus. So let's go ahead and just look here really quickly. I'm just going to go over the basic areas of the website and you can investigate further on your own. But I basically wanted to show you that there are three sections to pay attention to. The very first area is the syllabus template. And this is something that you can download and you can fill in the areas with your information. It's already structured for you and organized for you. The directions are here. We also have syllabus examples. And so you can go here if you'd like to see a syllabus that is completed. And we also have some PDF versions that have little annotations, little notes on them. So if you are not sure where to find information that you need to put in your syllabus, for example, the very specific course description or things like that, we tell you where you can locate that so that you can add it to your syllabus. And lastly, we have some grab-and-go verbiage. And this is provided to you in case you have a syllabus that you've used elsewhere that you just need to make applicable to Harper. So we have some required wording that we would like you to insert into your syllabus. And you can grab it here, copy it, and then you can paste it into your syllabus. Once you have gone to this website and you have created your syllabus and you've put all the very important information in there, then it's time to share your syllabus. And so we do ask that you post it on your Blackboard course shell for all of your students to see. We also ask that you send it to your department so that they have a current syllabus on file. And then after you create and gather this information, you need to share it in engaging ways so students are able to pay attention and get through some of those barriers because we want them to be successful in their course journey. And so a few ideas are listed here. Perhaps you can have them play a game, a memory game. Perhaps they can vote for the specific area, the specific part of the syllabus that they think is the very most important. You can have a character reading where you or some of your students try to act like famous people and use their voices, famous character voices, to read part of the syllabus. Something to make it memorable and to keep people's attention. Maybe you have a quick pair quiz happen with the content of the syllabus. Maybe you make a quick video that's engaging for students, that's interesting and unique. Or maybe you have your students make some type of interesting video about a particular area of the syllabus. So we have some ideas here for you, but maybe you have some other ideas. And so if you are willing to share your idea of how you shared your syllabus content with your students, that would be wonderful. We'd love to hear it. Please go ahead and email the academy at harpercollege.edu your ideas and we would love to hear them. And then we would love to share your ideas as well with other people. So thank you so much for listening to the Harper Syllabus Template presentation. Thank you for your attention. And if you have questions, please do feel free to contact myself or my co-worker Melissa Basinger, also an instructional design specialist here in the academy. And we hope that you have a wonderful semester.