We believe Digital Syllabus holds great potential to evolve into a more feature-rich service over time. User demands should primarily drive these developments, but the prototype development team has brainstormed a number of ideas for features that did not make the 1.0 version, but should be explored for subsequent versions.
A clear opportunity to add value and convenience to Digital Syllabus users is in the area of pre-loaded, customized data. This would be especially useful for data that remains the same for all courses within a given school (such as school address) and varies slightly or radically from one school to the next (such as term range, department names and department abbreviations).
Currently, only one Lead Instructor may be associated with a section, and Lead Instructors may assign write access to only one TA for a given section. If more than one TA is assigned to a single section, only one is designated a “Lead TA” and will be given write privileges. In the future, it might be better if Digital Syllabus allowed all TAs write access to their assigned sections.
The prototype includes “smoke and mirrors” links to add more resources and assignments than the default form can accommodate. This should become an actual feature.
Lead Instructors, and perhaps other types of instructors as well, could be given access to a name + email address roster of student users who have added their course to their list of subscriptions. This would be a convenience to instructors, as well as a way to encourage students to use Digital Syllabus.
As with many scheduling applications, we’d like ours to feature a quick way for the user to return to today’s date, no matter where in time s/he has wandered in the calendar.
Currently, student-level users are granted just read-only access to the records in Digital Syllabus, with one small exception: each may alter the completion status of any task in the system to reflect his or her work progress. We believe students might find it additionally useful to be able to add custom events (e.g., special appointments with instructors or fellow classmates), additional tasks and deadlines (e.g., self-paced study milestones, extra-curricular activities), additional resources (e.g., useful links on the Web not already mentioned by the instructors), and in-context annotations throughout multiple syllabus views.
Ideas in this area have included: Interactive lists of subscribing classmates & professors, email forms to facilitate communication between and among students and instructors; and “online now” indicator to see who else is logged in at a given time; a broadcast announcement channel from instructors to students; and a threaded bulletin board service.
Terms of Service outlines all terms of using the Digital Syllabus service. Forgot your Password? explains how to retrieve lost information. Instructor Profile provides a summary view of a Lead Instructor (and perhaps other instructors as well), just as the Course Profile page summarizes basic information for a given course. Course Bibliography lists bibliographic records for all texts used in a given course (an optional feature that would be more useful for some courses than for others).
New visualizations of course information by Term or by Date Range might be worth exploring for Digital Syllabus. User testing can determine how useful these views might be for students and instructors.
Another feature that might be useful to both students and instructors is the availability of a printer-friendly syllabus view for a given course. This might be an optional choice (to be made by the Lead Instructor or Teaching Assistants), depending on how complete a course syllabus is at a given time.
Currently, an assignment is categorized into one of two possible status states: "in-progress" (defined as all unchecked assignments that associated with a section item occurring sometime in the past, whose due dates are either today or sometime in the future) and “done” (all checked assignments). The introduction of an "overdue" status state (all unchecked assignments whose due dates have already passed) would be a nice enhancement. Color-coding (e.g., green/yellow/red) could be useful as a quick means of distinguishing the three states.
Many students today use PDA devices as a time and task management tool. Digital Syllabus seems particularly well positioned to transfer naturally to the palmtop environment, either syncing with native PalmOS software or with a version of Digital Syllabus specially adapted to the palm environment.
A simple search function would allow users quick access to events, tasks and materials stored in the Digital Syllabus database.
Students and instructors alike would certainly find it useful to view past course syllabus information.
Given that syllabus information for most courses typically undergoes changes throughout the term in which the course is taught, and given that students may not always recognize brand-new or recently updated information in the context of calendar views, it might enhance the service to support (optional) email alerts or visual cues on the interface (such as a textual “New!” message) to denote fresh content.
Subtle iconic cues, to distinguish between different types of information being presented, might facilitate a quicker understanding of displayed information. The introduction of iconography into the interface would require a skilled designer and user testing to ensure that visual cues help rather than confuse users.
Lead Instructors and/or students may find it useful to be able to control the color scheme or overall “look & feel” associated with each individual course, as a means of defining an individual character for each.
The job of Lead Instructors would arguably be simplified if they had the ability to import information from a standard format (e.g., a MS Word document), or pre-populate the syllabus builder with default data drawn from a previously configured course. This feature would be especially handy for instructors who teach the same course year-after-year, with only minor updates.