Simplifying Syllabi Creation Using a Syllabus Management Application
Join a panel of your peers as they discuss how they streamlined the syllabus creation process saving instructors time, improving the learning experience, and complying with accreditation requirements using Simple Syllabus. Additionally, learn how this tool seamlessly integrates within Canvas and automatically creates a repository for all your campus syllabi.
Good morning. Thank you all for joining us here for today's panel. We are really excited to have all of you, with us. Today's session or our panel gonna be about simplifying syllabi creation using a syllabus management application. So with that said, we've put together, a brief meeting agenda that we'll run through. We'll just start with some quick introductions, and then give you guys a really quick, primer on simple syllabus for anybody hasn't, had any exposure to it.
And then, of course, our stars of the show, the panel here, we're gonna get into some q and a with them so that they can answer any, kinda give you guys some insight into what that process has looked like at their campuses. And then we'll open it up for Q and A for all of with that said, wanted to start off with a question. Who here has simple syllabus at their campus today? Okay. Quite a few. How many folks here are using word docs or some other type of document template approach? Okay.
And who all has nothing at all? No process whatsoever. Couple people. Awesome. Awesome. Well, today, we're gonna kinda talk about from the from the standpoint of when schools had nothing at all to today them having civil syllabus kinda explore what that process looked like.
So let's meet our presenters. My name's Wes Miller. I'm a co founder here at Simple syllabus, and and my role is going to be really to facilitate, the Q and A process with, our crew here. So I'll let Sherry take it away. Good morning, everyone.
My name is Sherry Carpenter. I come to you from Ren Lake College, which is located in Southern Illinois. We launched, simple syllabus in fall of twenty two. So we're still kinda new, but loving it. Great day, everyone.
Tasha Brown from the University of South Florida Tampa, Florida. And we launched simple syllabus in the spring of twenty twenty three, but we started the conversation with them around March of twenty twenty two. So we've been in a problem. Hi. I'm Corey Schneider.
I represent the Alamo College's District, which is five dependently accredited colleges, Northwest Vista Lakeview, San Antonio College, Palo Alto College, and I'm Saint Phillips College. I knew I was gonna forget one. And it's no slight to them. So we have about sixty five thousand students. And so we're a very large community College District.
Alright. So for anyone who isn't already familiar with the simple syllabus, it is a centralized template driven, publishing platform for digital class syllabi. And one thing we always like to stress is the fact that it is solution for everyone on campus, whether it's the students in making, syllabi and their information much more accessible, or instructors, saving them a bunch time, making the process of syllabus creation easier or administrators, making the retention of this information retrieval, improving the delivery of curriculum a lot better with that said, we did wanna show you real quick what the tool looks like, and then we'll get right into those questions. Kinda give you guys a little bit of perspective on, the technology. For example, here we have the syllabus law, repository for Alamo College's District.
It is where all the syllabi once published go in our store. So, of course, they'd also be inside Canvas, but this is an example of an external repository where you can retrieve any of those syllabi through quick and easy, filters. If I was to show you what a digital syllabus might look like in the simple syllabus platform, it would look like this. You can see on the left hand side, it's got a table of contents that makes very quick and easy for students to jump around to the various areas or aspects of the syllabus. And each area of the syllabus, we call components.
So when I talk out templates. They consist of components, and those components can be completely editable. They can be locked down. They can prepopulate with information from the SIS, the LMS, or can be just pushed out centrally from the administration. Maybe it's a policy around ADA, maybe it's a policy around, drop add, all of that.
Let's see. As you all probably have experienced today, the, internet is not the fastest here. But but we'll come back to that. Well, of course, show you guys, the USF site here that Tasha, is responsible for, again, the library. And, lay College, where Sherry is from.
With that said, while that loads, I think that kinda gives you guys a little base introduction to the simple syllabus platform form, and we'll get into our questions. Alright. So, wanted to kick this off with, the start of the whole process. So Tasha, maybe you could be the first to, jump into this one. No pressure.
Right? No pressure. So what made your institution institution begin exploring the concept of digital syllabi. And what were some of the challenges you were faced in your past processes? So in September of twenty me one, mice, the academic affairs dean approached me and said Tasha, we need to improve our syllabi. We were using word documents as and you all were and are using. And the problem we were experiencing mostly, they were not updating the policies.
So we had a word document template with the policies the the all the components of the syllabi, but you know, the policies may change after the template was, deployed to the faculty. And so the faster, the academic attorney asked me, can we just put the policies on boxed? And I said, well, that's so nineteen ninety. And can we be twenty twenty two, at least? And so, he asked. He said, what do we need now? So we need a syllabus management app application repository. And so at that point, he sent me on the journey to, figure that out.
Keeping in mind, this is only for the College of Nursing. The university has not adopted this tool. And so we were trying to implement this tool to make sure that our students what they needed, but as well as making the process easier for our faculty. During this time, I discovered that it was taken our faculty hours to complete their syllabi, sometime three to four hours. Some even reported five, six hours.
Some reported thirty minutes, but those that were reported in thirty, forty five minutes. I learned they were really not updating their syllabus. The reason I found that out, we have switched from one Procter and solution to another one, and have been gone for a year, and they still have that proctoring solution in the syllabus template. So we made that switch, and we just begin that discovery phase, obviously went through several vendors with simple being our top choice, our first choice, and the beauty of it there in our backyard, we're literally twenty minutes away from them. So it made up the decision much easier, but it saves our faculty time in creating their syllabi.
Did I address all your questions? Yes. Absolutely. And then some. Thank so much. So, at this point, let's go on to Corey, and maybe we could with the same question.
So, certainly came on, from a different path, but, do you wanna talk a little bit more about why your institution began exploring simple syllabus, and digital syllabi as a whole, and what were some of the challenges with your past process. So we, so the house bill, for Texas came out in, two thousand nine, I had to print it out. I would never remember the date, which is Houseville, twenty five zero four, which means that we have to have all of our Libi for, our institution public. And we had our homegrown system for probably a couple of years, but it really didn't take didn't have any We did come off of another solution. And so the reasons why I had to make my notes, the reason why we came off that other solution was it had a very strict timeline.
When they first, rolled it out, one person would go in and enter stuff into the syllabi, and then it would get locked down. And then the next person would go in and enter their piece of information and it got locked down. Well, in that timeline, a lot of things change. There was staffing changes. There was all these different things, and it was really difficult to get those things updated.
And so we were working on the syllabi in spring for fall. And faculty were like, all this information's old. And then, COVID hit, our governor decided to lift mask mandates that was already in the syllabi from eight, nine weeks ago. And so we were having a hard time updating information that had been in previous ports, or portions of the timeline. So that was one reason.
Staffing changes. We we couldn't keep up with all the staffing of who needed access to which template, to where, Dean's, whoever in the chain might have retired, moved on, received promotions, and getting that information updated was a little difficult when it was at the instructor level. And then, oh, we had scripts that ran throughout the week. And so When this piece was locked down, that script didn't run till Monday. The script didn't run till Tuesday morning this script ran this part.
And if one of those pieces, those scripts broke or didn't run at the appropriate time, then we were running throughout the day, checking to make sure everything was running It just became a little bit of a a process. So we started looking for some new solutions, and we came upon simple syllabus to how ease all of those frustrations. Thank you. And we're happy that you did. Well, at this point, Sherry, do you wanna try and, again, give us a little bit of background? Sure.
So, like Tasha and many of you, we were in the word document world, and that was a nightmare to say the least. We did have a collection of what we used or what we call course masters. And so that was that, that piece of the syllabi that represented no matter what instructor taught that course, these things were all the same. The course description, the outcomes, you all probably know where I'm at. So we had that collection of course masters, and we housed that in share point.
So all faculty had access to that. And ideally, they would look at that course master and build their instructor or their section syllabi from that course master. We even put out a protected word template in the SharePoint and encourage them each semester to click on new and all the things were protected that they shouldn't change, but allow them to change. But that was clunky in itself. Faculty struggled with that, even those that were tech savvy, it just the more we pushed it to work for us, the more we broke it.
So we kept looking at that and, trying to to weed through that. And then along came a demo with Simpo Silva. So, not only the clunky us of using the word documents in the template from SharePoint, but it was inconsistency of the syllabi. Because now naturally. I was faculty for nearly twenty years.
So I know how easy it is to pull last semester, update the few little things and beyond with it. And so that was super easy to do. And and I I get that. I get that. But then a lot of times, those faculty who did who would do that would miss the the institutional or administrative language changes that needed to happen.
We would announce those. We would try to get that out of faculty, but it that sometimes didn't happen as as you all have experienced. You open up a a syllabus and it had language from three semesters ago. So that was one of the things was, you know, housing the syllabi and making it public for creditors or for students or faculty, the inconsistency of the syllabi and just the clunkingness of what we were using. So along came simple and made it simple.
Thank you. Well, let let's stick with you Do you wanna go into a little bit more in-depth, more specifically about how has simple syllabus helped your institution overcome some of those challenges? So, It it it really has been simple. I and they didn't pay me to say that. Alright? So when we started and when we did sign on, one of the things that was hard for us is because of all the word document collection, we're very manual. So when it came to starting simple of us, that piece was manual for us too.
So we had a a team that we had to build, and it was not their fault. That was just where we came from, from our home grown SIS to a s an SIS that I would encourage you not to go to, but we won't say that. But the it just didn't allow us to do any of those things seamlessly. So it was clunky and and difficult for us to do the manual work. So we did phases, fall, worked on fall.
We didn't touch spring until it was time to touch spring. So, that that piece was just on us. Faculty didn't see all that. We didn't wanna them to see all that. But we did incur by sending out email updates of where we were headed.
That simple coming. And I, you know, I don't know about your faculty, but I know ours, when you say change or you bring up a new technology tool, they're freaking out. So we were very careful to let them know what it was about. And as we were going through the steps of building where we were it was coming and ensuring that we were there for them, and that simple was there for us. So I've not just how how has it helped you address, those overcome those issues? So when it came time for faculty to touch, we did meet with our instructional beans and our administrative assistants because they tend to be on the front lines when instructors have They would call us, but naturally they're gonna go to their deans and administrative assistants.
So we sat down with them, had a nice couple hour meaning of what simple looks like, how it's gonna work, how it will look for faculty and what we expect for them. But when it came to faculty, all it was, I did a couple of video recordings to email out. I had a couple of sessions at early on in meetings before the semester began, just to show them to expect, but it was easy for them. They clicked in we used obviously, we have it integrated with Canvas. So let's get into your course, click the simple of us button, there it is.
Fill in the blanks. So we didn't have to worry about inconsistency because all that is pushed through. All we to worry about is that instructor putting in their personal pol policies for their class, their, office hours, any things that they needed to let their students know. So all of those that clunkingness is gone, the inconsistency is gone, all of is gone. Thank you.
So, to go back to Corey real quick, she mentioned, some issues around with the previous approach solution around data and the timing of that data. And so maybe you could talk a little bit more about how simple has helped your institution overcome some of those challenges. So our faculty never knew. They got a little timeline that says here's when they're gonna be edit their their syllabi. They didn't get to see the mountains of timelines that we had to do for the upcoming semester stage so we started working on our syllabi, get loading everything into the system back in April.
It really has taken our timeline from several if you map it out several pages down to like this. And so it's that has been amazing our team because now we can actually just have like two or three dates that we have to watch to make sure everything's okay instead of several months of dates to get everything up dated. That has been amazing for us. But so I have to refer back to my notes because otherwise, oh, I remember. The the other things that is overcome is that everybody's in it at the same time.
We can make updates to differ portions throughout the semester. So if there's timeline changes, accreditation changes, something else happens, those individuals can go in and update those syllabi for the upcoming semester. So we have one big huge and we have all of these parts of term, and they can go into all those parts of terms that are coming up and make those changes. Oh, the accrediting body says we need to have x y z on our syllabi. They go and open up that next part of term, make all of those changes, and then it rolls forward, which has been amazing.
And then I'm also gonna just say. There's a lot of conditional logic. We have a lot of different accrediting bodies. So we have aviation. We have nursing.
We have all of these different things. We're making sure that we're meeting Sachs accreditation, but all of these other departments and programs we're having to meet other accredit bodies, and they're able to go in there and and add in different components that meet their syllabi. There's probably one other there's probably about five other things that are just amazing. Awesome. And thanks for sharing that.
And to take, something Corey said a little bit further, simple syllabus has a concept called conditional logic when you think of templates, maintaining templates takes time. And so one kind of unique innovation to simple syllabus is this idea that the components on a template can dynamically swap out based on your institution's data. And so as she's mentioned, Alamo, makes heavy use of this. So if it's an online delivery of course, certain parts of the syllabus might say one thing. If it's in person delivery, it might say something different, or if it's a general ed course, graduate level hours.
So making use of that really cuts down on the amount of time, institutions that have simple syllabus required to not only implement the tool, but maintain it, in terms of staff hours. So Oh, absolutely. So along with that conditional logic, found, music. So we had a particular component that pretty much pushed out the same for all of the music that we had one faculty member that really needed it to look a little bit different. It was one of the course, excuse me, the schedule component that she had laid out.
She wanted that to look just a little different than everyone else, and we were able to do that for her with that conditional logic. So it's a really cool feature. That's a great story. Gonna reach in front of Tasha. Well, coincidentally, it's going to to, Tasha next.
So, with that said, tasha, I wanted to come back to the implementation process. Do you think you could share with everyone here today what that implement implementation process looked like how did that go? What was faculty reception and anything else you think might be worth sharing? So as we after we selected as our vendor, we have to work through our IT unit. They have to validate the software, make sure it's aligning with their standards and all that fun stuff. And that took about three months on our side. And then we were able to start working with Simple.
Simple has about a twelve week implementation process, and so we were starting this September, and my goal was to launch for spring of twenty three. So that meant we had a very tight timeline. And so what we did during that discovery phase is they have all these that's available for you, where you put in information, the content that you need, the components. So we're gonna have a welcome, how to succeed the great nation, all those different components. And then we identified if, those components were open to faculty, to edit, or figure or not.
So, obviously, welcome how to succeed or open. However, the grade in scale is not because that is defined by the university, alone with all the policies. So we identified that at the early stages and what can and cannot edit at the designer level or at the session instructor level. And we did that by providing them first with our word document template all of our appendices with all of our policies. And they inputted that into simple.
And once we did that, then they provided some trainings for And we had three trainers. One, first, the first and second trainer with with me and our team, and we were working with our IT team to have or integrated. That was our S and SIS system. And we wanted to make sure that we had information pulling directly from banner into our simple syllabus template. So faculty would not have to worry about the course title, the CRN number, the prerequisite, the course the meeting location.
So if you're meeting online or in person, all of those things, faculty would not have to worry about because that is put in simple. And so we worked very closely to make sure all that integration was happening. And then once we went through the implementation, we actually had third training where they in like faculty to attend third training, but we do not allow our faculty to to interact with the vendors because the poor vendors would never get their training done. And so we at that point after we had gone through the first three training on December the twelfth twenty twenty two was our first implementation with the college. That was day for us.
And we launched it. We had three trainings that day. We also had open our office hours where we sat in various classroom and faculty just came in to try to implement Part of our implementation included webinars. We did a lot of one on one and small group sessions. The small groups could have been with specific programs, so let's about our nurse anesthesia program, whatever their policies were.
We implemented with the them that way, and then we did, resources. So we have a website all the resources available so that way faculty can do and implement without us if necessary. So that's what our implementation looked like for the most part. It was a lot going back and forth. But for the most part, our faculty was very receptive because they recognized it was gonna help them save time and overall improve the process.
Very good. Thanks for sharing. And I'm gonna kinda build on that a little bit. One thing that, Tasha mentioned was the integration piece. That's part of what we call, the technical pathway in an implementation.
And, you mentioned how we integrated with spanner. So as you could all imagine being here at Instructure Con, we integrate seamlessly with Canvas. You can see on the screen here an example of it within LTI. We also integrate with the Canvas API to pull in things like the days, the times, the due dates on the hereby. But she mentioned banner, things like the credit hours, prerequisites, catalog description.
These are all examples of data just flowing in so that the instructor doesn't need to input that information. So I think that was a really big piece. A lot a lot of schools really find that valuable as part of the implementation process. It is very valuable. I did not know for my faculty just finding that CR number was a challenge.
And they said, Tasha, I don't have to put that in anymore. I said, no, banner is doing that for you. Thank you. So it was just trying to find number because it changes every semester was a hassle. So simple things like that.
Now, we have incurred a few of row bumps when it comes like the meet and time We have a meeting room on there. It may change. When we go in banner and change it, faculty freak out because they don't see it right then and they're changing. So we have started implementing with part of this when a requested room change, it will happen. It happens overnight.
It's not a microwave. So give it a few hours. And so we them now to check around eleven AM the next day and it's updated. Normally, it updates before then, but eleven AM is my grace period with them. So these changes are happening as we make them in banner.
It happens as simple, which again makes life much easier for everyone. Thank you. And, in addition banner. We do work with most major, SAS platforms. So if you use banner, colleague, PeopleSoft, Gen Zabar, and quite a few others, we could we'd be here all if I listed them all off, but, all of that data can can be synced into, your syllabi.
Yep. So for the LMSes, it's all through API and LTI. From the SIS's, it depends on which SIS Some of them we have prebuilt APIs, and some of which we use flat file transfers, sort of in automated time frames. For example, banner can be four hours. Yes.
So we have one template, but we have the conditional logic that allows us to, have certain policies or certain things for certain, programs. Keeping in mind, this is only for the college of nursing. The university has not adopted. We have another college of public health. That joining us right now.
We're hoping the college would make the switch soon because of a senate bill we had passed last year, but we have one template each semester. And that's the beautiful thing. I don't have to worry about ten thousand templates anymore. One template conditional logic is my friend. Yes.
So on our campus, we have the the main template that flows through, but then we do have a separate template for our, Allied health department because of our nursing and the ACEN accreditation and the things that they need to have on there. So we do pull in the conditional logic, but we also have a was specific specific for that particular department. When seeing the syllabus, absolutely. So it would be completely embedded here within, Canvas. So I can actually just submit this here and we'll see what the student experience looks like, once the net connects.
You see, a confetti launches as, you complete your syllabus, but we'll give that a couple of seconds there. Correct. Some schools will, keep that syllabus and maybe name this, of course, outline. It just depends on the type of institution, but most drop that and then, put in simple syllabus. They'll name it whatever they wanna name it because it's an LTI tool, but that's how it'll typically manifest.
Oh, okay. Awesome. So we, we kind of encourage the fact to go in and use both of them. So you have your your simple syllabus, which we renamed course syllabus, and then you have the canvas syllabus. They like the the to do list on the on the Canvas syllabus.
And so they can put the instructors can put some stuff on the top. You know, basically, like, what their maybe their requirements or a handful of things, the short list of their syllabus, because we know, you know, like, we have a lot of institutional these college policies. We have outcomes. We have all of this fun stuff as much as we would love students to read it. But they need to they need to have that to do is what we kind of figured.
So of the assignments. Correct. So, yeah, we they can use both. Yes. So part of our house bill is that, you know, they have to have, like, major assignments in their syllabus publicly.
And you can pull the Canvas assignments over into simple syllabus as well with the with the class importer, the class scheduler, but those are locked down by for student roles. So for the public role, you know, they they can have ours. We have two different two different components. They have one that they can do their, their tables and all of their other stuff because they might have some other things that they might want to put it in there versus what's in Canvas. So the we locked it down where our student or our instructors can't copy and paste from word because I love to do and they never put the accessibility stuff on it.
So, ours have to build it once inside a simple syllabus, put all the headers and the accessibility components on it, and then they can roll it and make changes on it. Yeah. This one is actually is this one ours or this one's this one's simple to hold this. I can show you ours in a minute. This is a template right Oh, okay.
But it looks like just like the, like, a regular word box like that, like, with the grades and stuff like that where they can go in do the edit. Does anybody have a percentage of I'm saved. Oh, Latasha's got a great example. I'll help, West find a table. We're I actually writing a publication right now on this.
And so from my data that I've collected, we've gone from four hours to about an hour. And that was the first time because Falcon had to still copy and paste, but now we're seeing it's going from below an hour even shorter than that because the beauty of simple syllabus once your syllabus is in simple, it automatically copies the content to the next semester. So for instance, right now, if the course is being taught in the summer and that same courses being taught in the fall, the content automatically rolls over. They don't even have to do the import functionality, and then faculty just go in. If they wanna change the welcome how to see wherever those components are, they can, but they are not required to because that content is already there.
Essentially, what faculty have to update in their of us is the course schedule, and then they verify everything else is accurate based on what they want to teach us to. So it's really saving time now because they don't have to copy and paste every single semester. It's built for them. And that acknowledged feature at the bottom is very helpful, helpful because now it can replace if you have in your course that syllabus quiz, the first week. We also have to do a first day of attendance our institution, and that replaces that.
So simply the students just go in and scroll to the very bottom. That does not indicate that they read it. But if they scroll to the very bottom and do the acknowledged. But, and then the faculty can take that, list of completed students that acknowledge and This is the first day of attendance. This is also your simple or your syllabus quiz.
So if you have problems, you have that as your acknowledgement. Yeah. So Okay. Okay. Where are you from? Okay.
So certainly, it it depends on the systems and things like that. But, in this case, so we work with an of schools where there is a centralized SIS and, different LMSs. First off, we don't necessarily need an integration with the SIS That typically enriches the data that we already have from the LMS. So things like the users, the accounts, the courses, this the the different offerings, the enrollments, we can all of that directly from Canvas through their API. When the SAS comes into play is if you wanna preload for the instructors, things like the building, the room, catalog description.
So you nest don't necessarily need to do any of that. It does enhance the value for your end users because it'll prepopulate take that and save them a bunch of time. Mhmm. I see. Yeah.
Magically happen. Out of magic. I don't magic. So So from for USF College of nurse, was my instructional design team, my assessment and evaluation team, and then we collaborated with USF IT team, which also is includes our campus administrator. So, my instructional design team was involved in making sure everything is set up correctly.
They tested and made sure from that standpoint, also looking at the policies, making sure those things are sort of correct. My assessment team is responsible for putting all the courses in banner for each college of nursing course, each Mester. So they put all that information in, and then the Canvas administrator, which works in USFIT, they may sure all the integrations behind the scene what happened. So I think we have Samuel or Samuel, something like that. He always say.
But he was responsible for making sure all that communication was happening. So if we noticed a mistake, we necessarily didn't go back to our Canvas administrator. I went back to my assessment team and say, Hey, this information is not pulling directly from banner correct. That means something is incorrect. So the team was vast in that nature with the instructional designers with the assessment team and the Canvas administrator.
And I'm not sure who he utilizes his team because he has a whole team that's ports him. Yes. Correct. Not eleven AM the next day. That is if we add a user or change the room number or prereqs things of that nature.
But if I make a change in a component, it happens immediately. So that's the difference. If I'm making a room change in banner. If I make a change in banner, that happens overnight. But everything else happens within simple that day.
So just for missed as, someone contacted me in the last week, my my d, academic being her new site. I can remember. She wanted to change in the syllabus. I verified it. May the condition change to that condition, that program, push it out, tow the falcon is going there, give it about ten minutes, grab a cup of coffee, and come back and check, and on number of courses that it has to impact, so it has to cycle through, but it automatically updates then.
And I'll just add to that. For instructors, when they make changes to their syllabus, it's instantaneous. If as an admin, you make it a a change and you're impacting three thousand syllabi, it's can take ten, fifteen minutes, to just run through and update them. The key is reminding your faculty is not a microwave. Give it a moment.
It will make the change. Just be patient. Or just as a collection or Can I answer it? That is my favorite feature sure is the reports. Because in our old solution, I had to go run the report and then give it to whoever needed it. So they were manually going checking every single syllabi to make sure that everything was still there because I could only see things from a certain point save.
But the reports inside of Simple syllabus allow there's a report editor or a report admin per mission, and I give that out, like, a lot. So, like, Dean's chairs, program directors. They can all go run their reports and see by part of term who has and hasn't done their solo And then there's also yes. And then if you go down, our favorite thing is, my colleague has figured out how like, I could call it hack, the document status report. You can add a whole bunch of different things and do reports off of that? Just just as a follow-up that, do you have, an API or an Yeah.
In addition to the reporting engine that's here, there is an API so you can query the information, build additional things beyond what we've provided. And we do have something that we're rolling out called SmartView, which is a custom report builder that'll export all this into PSVs in at predefined inch intervals. So the beautiful thing for people that's been using the word document, when you go to run that report, for accreditation standpoint, I have to have all of my, syllabus downloaded and ready and available for the creditors at site visit. So we normally would've been doing that through box have a person to go through each course. They have to look at them in the word document template, verify the course description outcome, objectives, major topics had not been changed.
Now we saved over thousands of hours from a person having to do that, and they would have to download it, put it on box. With this report and functionality here, you literally click a button, set your filters, do I wanna download all the completed syllabi in progress, whatever, and then you click a button, and it generates all of them as PDF in one folder in a matter of seconds. I then take that folder and just push it to box. So when our site visit come, we'll have them in box. But, likewise, our site visitors can go to this website and pull whichever syllabi they want down.
Is publicly available. So if you go to usf dot simple syllabus dot com, you can view every syllabi that we have created for the college of nursing. In the library. In the library. You can turn that off.
You have a you can turn that off if you want it publicly available or not, and they rolled that out right before we launched. Yeah. You can decide the scope of who all can access the library, whether it's just students and instructors or an admin or the general public, all of it's pretty granular. And the benefit there is to keep in mind the components. You can tell it if you want it visible public.
So keep it in mind for instructor information. If the instructors are putting their cell phone numbers, they may not want that publicly available. So at that point, we have the instructor information not publicly available. It's available to students enrolled in the course, but if you go to the public website, you would not see that your information. Yes.
Sure. We love that question. So we work with about three hundred colleges and universities, and the big that we've continually heard from our community. The thing that is big for them is the automation. And so what's unique to us is the ability to pull through Canvas, API, things like the days, or, excuse me, things like the assignments, the quizzes, the discussions, the due dates, pulling in all that information and pre building large parts of the syllabus for instructors so that they don't have to.
Addition to that, the configurability of the tool to meet a variety of different use cases, point in case the whole idea of conditional logic it's all about saving, stakeholders at the institution a tremendous amount of time. And maybe, I don't know if any of you speak to what stood out to you guys when when you went through the process. Okay. I'm being told to talk about, the support. We did several demos, and we were sold was simple on the day for day one.
Their integration within Canvas made it easy because it's all right there. But the biggest thing that sold me, one of our demos, we did not have a great demo. The audio was poor, and for me, that speak volume. They tells me that support may not be the greatest on the other end when I need it. But on with simple side, when I need support, just Monday, I was submitted help tickets.
And Eva, I think she does not take a break. She, as soon as the ticket comes in, she acknowledged and she's gonna give you a response within a few minutes. And she gives you a thorough response and she's available. So the support is amazing. The difference with other places, you may not get that support that quick, and it may not be, where they understand the problem and know the product.
So for me, it's not just the front end, it's the support on the back end and the quickness of that support. Of course. I talked I talked with Hope on Wednesdays. I've talked with John Austin on Fridays, and then I've talked with not Michael, not Mark. Tyler.
Tyler. Oh, I think Mondays. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Simple Sillas has office hours, and we stand in line and I'll make and I take away their lunch hour quite a bit. But also the faculty have the ability to submit, request and get help as well. So, during the so the faculty support is amazing as well. So the faculty can reach out to simple syllabus and talk to him within the syllabi. Yeah.
I think you were first. It is technically overwritten, but there is a changed history down at the bottom, and that that we encourage them to tell, especially on the templates where there might be multiple editors to let your other colleagues know what you made changes on. And they're quite great about, you know, locking each other out on different pieces and not changing and not can change this. So you're talking about the, like, Canvas cross listing? So we push from our banner SIS all of banner cross listed classes into individual sections. And our integration's a little bit different.
So we did our simple syllabus integration at the section level. So the sections students can see their individual section and not a merged, piece. So if we merged if we did our integration at the course level, they would have to see the the parent course syllabi. We did the cost list and we have the parent course, but the way we justify or modify that, the only thing that changes is section instructors. So we have them to list all the instructors on the master and just put their section number they were teaching.
Yes. In the process window right now, we also do at the section level. And for the instructors, because they're in multiple sections, so this doesn't really know what to do with them. So through Canvas, they get an error message, and they have to go to the simple dashboard. In order to pay the individual syllabus, and then they they're constantly asking us, like, well, what what are the students who don't know since we're only in one, so Silvis knows which one they're in, but because the teacher is in two, Silvis goes wanna send them in at home, throws up in Earth, which now we can customize a little bit, which is good, but it it's only text.
We'd we'd love to be able either, like, have a way for it to, like, to to dashboard directly or have some way of, like, having known that they're two options that I did. Yeah. So that was one of the things I've been meaning to put in to request. So that's one of the great things about simple syllabus is they're really listening to us. And so we we kind of reach out and go, Hey, this really great.
And so, we actually there's a document type now on our syllabus, because we wanted to be able to have templates versus the the syllabi themselves. So simple syllabus added that in the last feature release. Has been amazing. And then so I do have some ideas on how to improve the integration for those cross listed classes that when you, link on the section level versus the course level. Yep.
And I know we're running out of time here. So I think we got maybe we're going over. Maybe one more question, and then we'll all stay up here. And, if you have anything else, please certainly come come up in in CS. Yeah.
One point three? Yes. It does. It us, but that's probably a little bit of a long answer in terms of the different ways. Thank you all for coming.
And then, of course, our stars of the show, the panel here, we're gonna get into some q and a with them so that they can answer any, kinda give you guys some insight into what that process has looked like at their campuses. And then we'll open it up for Q and A for all of with that said, wanted to start off with a question. Who here has simple syllabus at their campus today? Okay. Quite a few. How many folks here are using word docs or some other type of document template approach? Okay.
And who all has nothing at all? No process whatsoever. Couple people. Awesome. Awesome. Well, today, we're gonna kinda talk about from the from the standpoint of when schools had nothing at all to today them having civil syllabus kinda explore what that process looked like.
So let's meet our presenters. My name's Wes Miller. I'm a co founder here at Simple syllabus, and and my role is going to be really to facilitate, the Q and A process with, our crew here. So I'll let Sherry take it away. Good morning, everyone.
My name is Sherry Carpenter. I come to you from Ren Lake College, which is located in Southern Illinois. We launched, simple syllabus in fall of twenty two. So we're still kinda new, but loving it. Great day, everyone.
Tasha Brown from the University of South Florida Tampa, Florida. And we launched simple syllabus in the spring of twenty twenty three, but we started the conversation with them around March of twenty twenty two. So we've been in a problem. Hi. I'm Corey Schneider.
I represent the Alamo College's District, which is five dependently accredited colleges, Northwest Vista Lakeview, San Antonio College, Palo Alto College, and I'm Saint Phillips College. I knew I was gonna forget one. And it's no slight to them. So we have about sixty five thousand students. And so we're a very large community College District.
Alright. So for anyone who isn't already familiar with the simple syllabus, it is a centralized template driven, publishing platform for digital class syllabi. And one thing we always like to stress is the fact that it is solution for everyone on campus, whether it's the students in making, syllabi and their information much more accessible, or instructors, saving them a bunch time, making the process of syllabus creation easier or administrators, making the retention of this information retrieval, improving the delivery of curriculum a lot better with that said, we did wanna show you real quick what the tool looks like, and then we'll get right into those questions. Kinda give you guys a little bit of perspective on, the technology. For example, here we have the syllabus law, repository for Alamo College's District.
It is where all the syllabi once published go in our store. So, of course, they'd also be inside Canvas, but this is an example of an external repository where you can retrieve any of those syllabi through quick and easy, filters. If I was to show you what a digital syllabus might look like in the simple syllabus platform, it would look like this. You can see on the left hand side, it's got a table of contents that makes very quick and easy for students to jump around to the various areas or aspects of the syllabus. And each area of the syllabus, we call components.
So when I talk out templates. They consist of components, and those components can be completely editable. They can be locked down. They can prepopulate with information from the SIS, the LMS, or can be just pushed out centrally from the administration. Maybe it's a policy around ADA, maybe it's a policy around, drop add, all of that.
Let's see. As you all probably have experienced today, the, internet is not the fastest here. But but we'll come back to that. Well, of course, show you guys, the USF site here that Tasha, is responsible for, again, the library. And, lay College, where Sherry is from.
With that said, while that loads, I think that kinda gives you guys a little base introduction to the simple syllabus platform form, and we'll get into our questions. Alright. So, wanted to kick this off with, the start of the whole process. So Tasha, maybe you could be the first to, jump into this one. No pressure.
Right? No pressure. So what made your institution institution begin exploring the concept of digital syllabi. And what were some of the challenges you were faced in your past processes? So in September of twenty me one, mice, the academic affairs dean approached me and said Tasha, we need to improve our syllabi. We were using word documents as and you all were and are using. And the problem we were experiencing mostly, they were not updating the policies.
So we had a word document template with the policies the the all the components of the syllabi, but you know, the policies may change after the template was, deployed to the faculty. And so the faster, the academic attorney asked me, can we just put the policies on boxed? And I said, well, that's so nineteen ninety. And can we be twenty twenty two, at least? And so, he asked. He said, what do we need now? So we need a syllabus management app application repository. And so at that point, he sent me on the journey to, figure that out.
Keeping in mind, this is only for the College of Nursing. The university has not adopted this tool. And so we were trying to implement this tool to make sure that our students what they needed, but as well as making the process easier for our faculty. During this time, I discovered that it was taken our faculty hours to complete their syllabi, sometime three to four hours. Some even reported five, six hours.
Some reported thirty minutes, but those that were reported in thirty, forty five minutes. I learned they were really not updating their syllabus. The reason I found that out, we have switched from one Procter and solution to another one, and have been gone for a year, and they still have that proctoring solution in the syllabus template. So we made that switch, and we just begin that discovery phase, obviously went through several vendors with simple being our top choice, our first choice, and the beauty of it there in our backyard, we're literally twenty minutes away from them. So it made up the decision much easier, but it saves our faculty time in creating their syllabi.
Did I address all your questions? Yes. Absolutely. And then some. Thank so much. So, at this point, let's go on to Corey, and maybe we could with the same question.
So, certainly came on, from a different path, but, do you wanna talk a little bit more about why your institution began exploring simple syllabus, and digital syllabi as a whole, and what were some of the challenges with your past process. So we, so the house bill, for Texas came out in, two thousand nine, I had to print it out. I would never remember the date, which is Houseville, twenty five zero four, which means that we have to have all of our Libi for, our institution public. And we had our homegrown system for probably a couple of years, but it really didn't take didn't have any We did come off of another solution. And so the reasons why I had to make my notes, the reason why we came off that other solution was it had a very strict timeline.
When they first, rolled it out, one person would go in and enter stuff into the syllabi, and then it would get locked down. And then the next person would go in and enter their piece of information and it got locked down. Well, in that timeline, a lot of things change. There was staffing changes. There was all these different things, and it was really difficult to get those things updated.
And so we were working on the syllabi in spring for fall. And faculty were like, all this information's old. And then, COVID hit, our governor decided to lift mask mandates that was already in the syllabi from eight, nine weeks ago. And so we were having a hard time updating information that had been in previous ports, or portions of the timeline. So that was one reason.
Staffing changes. We we couldn't keep up with all the staffing of who needed access to which template, to where, Dean's, whoever in the chain might have retired, moved on, received promotions, and getting that information updated was a little difficult when it was at the instructor level. And then, oh, we had scripts that ran throughout the week. And so When this piece was locked down, that script didn't run till Monday. The script didn't run till Tuesday morning this script ran this part.
And if one of those pieces, those scripts broke or didn't run at the appropriate time, then we were running throughout the day, checking to make sure everything was running It just became a little bit of a a process. So we started looking for some new solutions, and we came upon simple syllabus to how ease all of those frustrations. Thank you. And we're happy that you did. Well, at this point, Sherry, do you wanna try and, again, give us a little bit of background? Sure.
So, like Tasha and many of you, we were in the word document world, and that was a nightmare to say the least. We did have a collection of what we used or what we call course masters. And so that was that, that piece of the syllabi that represented no matter what instructor taught that course, these things were all the same. The course description, the outcomes, you all probably know where I'm at. So we had that collection of course masters, and we housed that in share point.
So all faculty had access to that. And ideally, they would look at that course master and build their instructor or their section syllabi from that course master. We even put out a protected word template in the SharePoint and encourage them each semester to click on new and all the things were protected that they shouldn't change, but allow them to change. But that was clunky in itself. Faculty struggled with that, even those that were tech savvy, it just the more we pushed it to work for us, the more we broke it.
So we kept looking at that and, trying to to weed through that. And then along came a demo with Simpo Silva. So, not only the clunky us of using the word documents in the template from SharePoint, but it was inconsistency of the syllabi. Because now naturally. I was faculty for nearly twenty years.
So I know how easy it is to pull last semester, update the few little things and beyond with it. And so that was super easy to do. And and I I get that. I get that. But then a lot of times, those faculty who did who would do that would miss the the institutional or administrative language changes that needed to happen.
We would announce those. We would try to get that out of faculty, but it that sometimes didn't happen as as you all have experienced. You open up a a syllabus and it had language from three semesters ago. So that was one of the things was, you know, housing the syllabi and making it public for creditors or for students or faculty, the inconsistency of the syllabi and just the clunkingness of what we were using. So along came simple and made it simple.
Thank you. Well, let let's stick with you Do you wanna go into a little bit more in-depth, more specifically about how has simple syllabus helped your institution overcome some of those challenges? So, It it it really has been simple. I and they didn't pay me to say that. Alright? So when we started and when we did sign on, one of the things that was hard for us is because of all the word document collection, we're very manual. So when it came to starting simple of us, that piece was manual for us too.
So we had a a team that we had to build, and it was not their fault. That was just where we came from, from our home grown SIS to a s an SIS that I would encourage you not to go to, but we won't say that. But the it just didn't allow us to do any of those things seamlessly. So it was clunky and and difficult for us to do the manual work. So we did phases, fall, worked on fall.
We didn't touch spring until it was time to touch spring. So, that that piece was just on us. Faculty didn't see all that. We didn't wanna them to see all that. But we did incur by sending out email updates of where we were headed.
That simple coming. And I, you know, I don't know about your faculty, but I know ours, when you say change or you bring up a new technology tool, they're freaking out. So we were very careful to let them know what it was about. And as we were going through the steps of building where we were it was coming and ensuring that we were there for them, and that simple was there for us. So I've not just how how has it helped you address, those overcome those issues? So when it came time for faculty to touch, we did meet with our instructional beans and our administrative assistants because they tend to be on the front lines when instructors have They would call us, but naturally they're gonna go to their deans and administrative assistants.
So we sat down with them, had a nice couple hour meaning of what simple looks like, how it's gonna work, how it will look for faculty and what we expect for them. But when it came to faculty, all it was, I did a couple of video recordings to email out. I had a couple of sessions at early on in meetings before the semester began, just to show them to expect, but it was easy for them. They clicked in we used obviously, we have it integrated with Canvas. So let's get into your course, click the simple of us button, there it is.
Fill in the blanks. So we didn't have to worry about inconsistency because all that is pushed through. All we to worry about is that instructor putting in their personal pol policies for their class, their, office hours, any things that they needed to let their students know. So all of those that clunkingness is gone, the inconsistency is gone, all of is gone. Thank you.
So, to go back to Corey real quick, she mentioned, some issues around with the previous approach solution around data and the timing of that data. And so maybe you could talk a little bit more about how simple has helped your institution overcome some of those challenges. So our faculty never knew. They got a little timeline that says here's when they're gonna be edit their their syllabi. They didn't get to see the mountains of timelines that we had to do for the upcoming semester stage so we started working on our syllabi, get loading everything into the system back in April.
It really has taken our timeline from several if you map it out several pages down to like this. And so it's that has been amazing our team because now we can actually just have like two or three dates that we have to watch to make sure everything's okay instead of several months of dates to get everything up dated. That has been amazing for us. But so I have to refer back to my notes because otherwise, oh, I remember. The the other things that is overcome is that everybody's in it at the same time.
We can make updates to differ portions throughout the semester. So if there's timeline changes, accreditation changes, something else happens, those individuals can go in and update those syllabi for the upcoming semester. So we have one big huge and we have all of these parts of term, and they can go into all those parts of terms that are coming up and make those changes. Oh, the accrediting body says we need to have x y z on our syllabi. They go and open up that next part of term, make all of those changes, and then it rolls forward, which has been amazing.
And then I'm also gonna just say. There's a lot of conditional logic. We have a lot of different accrediting bodies. So we have aviation. We have nursing.
We have all of these different things. We're making sure that we're meeting Sachs accreditation, but all of these other departments and programs we're having to meet other accredit bodies, and they're able to go in there and and add in different components that meet their syllabi. There's probably one other there's probably about five other things that are just amazing. Awesome. And thanks for sharing that.
And to take, something Corey said a little bit further, simple syllabus has a concept called conditional logic when you think of templates, maintaining templates takes time. And so one kind of unique innovation to simple syllabus is this idea that the components on a template can dynamically swap out based on your institution's data. And so as she's mentioned, Alamo, makes heavy use of this. So if it's an online delivery of course, certain parts of the syllabus might say one thing. If it's in person delivery, it might say something different, or if it's a general ed course, graduate level hours.
So making use of that really cuts down on the amount of time, institutions that have simple syllabus required to not only implement the tool, but maintain it, in terms of staff hours. So Oh, absolutely. So along with that conditional logic, found, music. So we had a particular component that pretty much pushed out the same for all of the music that we had one faculty member that really needed it to look a little bit different. It was one of the course, excuse me, the schedule component that she had laid out.
She wanted that to look just a little different than everyone else, and we were able to do that for her with that conditional logic. So it's a really cool feature. That's a great story. Gonna reach in front of Tasha. Well, coincidentally, it's going to to, Tasha next.
So, with that said, tasha, I wanted to come back to the implementation process. Do you think you could share with everyone here today what that implement implementation process looked like how did that go? What was faculty reception and anything else you think might be worth sharing? So as we after we selected as our vendor, we have to work through our IT unit. They have to validate the software, make sure it's aligning with their standards and all that fun stuff. And that took about three months on our side. And then we were able to start working with Simple.
Simple has about a twelve week implementation process, and so we were starting this September, and my goal was to launch for spring of twenty three. So that meant we had a very tight timeline. And so what we did during that discovery phase is they have all these that's available for you, where you put in information, the content that you need, the components. So we're gonna have a welcome, how to succeed the great nation, all those different components. And then we identified if, those components were open to faculty, to edit, or figure or not.
So, obviously, welcome how to succeed or open. However, the grade in scale is not because that is defined by the university, alone with all the policies. So we identified that at the early stages and what can and cannot edit at the designer level or at the session instructor level. And we did that by providing them first with our word document template all of our appendices with all of our policies. And they inputted that into simple.
And once we did that, then they provided some trainings for And we had three trainers. One, first, the first and second trainer with with me and our team, and we were working with our IT team to have or integrated. That was our S and SIS system. And we wanted to make sure that we had information pulling directly from banner into our simple syllabus template. So faculty would not have to worry about the course title, the CRN number, the prerequisite, the course the meeting location.
So if you're meeting online or in person, all of those things, faculty would not have to worry about because that is put in simple. And so we worked very closely to make sure all that integration was happening. And then once we went through the implementation, we actually had third training where they in like faculty to attend third training, but we do not allow our faculty to to interact with the vendors because the poor vendors would never get their training done. And so we at that point after we had gone through the first three training on December the twelfth twenty twenty two was our first implementation with the college. That was day for us.
And we launched it. We had three trainings that day. We also had open our office hours where we sat in various classroom and faculty just came in to try to implement Part of our implementation included webinars. We did a lot of one on one and small group sessions. The small groups could have been with specific programs, so let's about our nurse anesthesia program, whatever their policies were.
We implemented with the them that way, and then we did, resources. So we have a website all the resources available so that way faculty can do and implement without us if necessary. So that's what our implementation looked like for the most part. It was a lot going back and forth. But for the most part, our faculty was very receptive because they recognized it was gonna help them save time and overall improve the process.
Very good. Thanks for sharing. And I'm gonna kinda build on that a little bit. One thing that, Tasha mentioned was the integration piece. That's part of what we call, the technical pathway in an implementation.
And, you mentioned how we integrated with spanner. So as you could all imagine being here at Instructure Con, we integrate seamlessly with Canvas. You can see on the screen here an example of it within LTI. We also integrate with the Canvas API to pull in things like the days, the times, the due dates on the hereby. But she mentioned banner, things like the credit hours, prerequisites, catalog description.
These are all examples of data just flowing in so that the instructor doesn't need to input that information. So I think that was a really big piece. A lot a lot of schools really find that valuable as part of the implementation process. It is very valuable. I did not know for my faculty just finding that CR number was a challenge.
And they said, Tasha, I don't have to put that in anymore. I said, no, banner is doing that for you. Thank you. So it was just trying to find number because it changes every semester was a hassle. So simple things like that.
Now, we have incurred a few of row bumps when it comes like the meet and time We have a meeting room on there. It may change. When we go in banner and change it, faculty freak out because they don't see it right then and they're changing. So we have started implementing with part of this when a requested room change, it will happen. It happens overnight.
It's not a microwave. So give it a few hours. And so we them now to check around eleven AM the next day and it's updated. Normally, it updates before then, but eleven AM is my grace period with them. So these changes are happening as we make them in banner.
It happens as simple, which again makes life much easier for everyone. Thank you. And, in addition banner. We do work with most major, SAS platforms. So if you use banner, colleague, PeopleSoft, Gen Zabar, and quite a few others, we could we'd be here all if I listed them all off, but, all of that data can can be synced into, your syllabi.
Yep. So for the LMSes, it's all through API and LTI. From the SIS's, it depends on which SIS Some of them we have prebuilt APIs, and some of which we use flat file transfers, sort of in automated time frames. For example, banner can be four hours. Yes.
So we have one template, but we have the conditional logic that allows us to, have certain policies or certain things for certain, programs. Keeping in mind, this is only for the college of nursing. The university has not adopted. We have another college of public health. That joining us right now.
We're hoping the college would make the switch soon because of a senate bill we had passed last year, but we have one template each semester. And that's the beautiful thing. I don't have to worry about ten thousand templates anymore. One template conditional logic is my friend. Yes.
So on our campus, we have the the main template that flows through, but then we do have a separate template for our, Allied health department because of our nursing and the ACEN accreditation and the things that they need to have on there. So we do pull in the conditional logic, but we also have a was specific specific for that particular department. When seeing the syllabus, absolutely. So it would be completely embedded here within, Canvas. So I can actually just submit this here and we'll see what the student experience looks like, once the net connects.
You see, a confetti launches as, you complete your syllabus, but we'll give that a couple of seconds there. Correct. Some schools will, keep that syllabus and maybe name this, of course, outline. It just depends on the type of institution, but most drop that and then, put in simple syllabus. They'll name it whatever they wanna name it because it's an LTI tool, but that's how it'll typically manifest.
Oh, okay. Awesome. So we, we kind of encourage the fact to go in and use both of them. So you have your your simple syllabus, which we renamed course syllabus, and then you have the canvas syllabus. They like the the to do list on the on the Canvas syllabus.
And so they can put the instructors can put some stuff on the top. You know, basically, like, what their maybe their requirements or a handful of things, the short list of their syllabus, because we know, you know, like, we have a lot of institutional these college policies. We have outcomes. We have all of this fun stuff as much as we would love students to read it. But they need to they need to have that to do is what we kind of figured.
So of the assignments. Correct. So, yeah, we they can use both. Yes. So part of our house bill is that, you know, they have to have, like, major assignments in their syllabus publicly.
And you can pull the Canvas assignments over into simple syllabus as well with the with the class importer, the class scheduler, but those are locked down by for student roles. So for the public role, you know, they they can have ours. We have two different two different components. They have one that they can do their, their tables and all of their other stuff because they might have some other things that they might want to put it in there versus what's in Canvas. So the we locked it down where our student or our instructors can't copy and paste from word because I love to do and they never put the accessibility stuff on it.
So, ours have to build it once inside a simple syllabus, put all the headers and the accessibility components on it, and then they can roll it and make changes on it. Yeah. This one is actually is this one ours or this one's this one's simple to hold this. I can show you ours in a minute. This is a template right Oh, okay.
But it looks like just like the, like, a regular word box like that, like, with the grades and stuff like that where they can go in do the edit. Does anybody have a percentage of I'm saved. Oh, Latasha's got a great example. I'll help, West find a table. We're I actually writing a publication right now on this.
And so from my data that I've collected, we've gone from four hours to about an hour. And that was the first time because Falcon had to still copy and paste, but now we're seeing it's going from below an hour even shorter than that because the beauty of simple syllabus once your syllabus is in simple, it automatically copies the content to the next semester. So for instance, right now, if the course is being taught in the summer and that same courses being taught in the fall, the content automatically rolls over. They don't even have to do the import functionality, and then faculty just go in. If they wanna change the welcome how to see wherever those components are, they can, but they are not required to because that content is already there.
Essentially, what faculty have to update in their of us is the course schedule, and then they verify everything else is accurate based on what they want to teach us to. So it's really saving time now because they don't have to copy and paste every single semester. It's built for them. And that acknowledged feature at the bottom is very helpful, helpful because now it can replace if you have in your course that syllabus quiz, the first week. We also have to do a first day of attendance our institution, and that replaces that.
So simply the students just go in and scroll to the very bottom. That does not indicate that they read it. But if they scroll to the very bottom and do the acknowledged. But, and then the faculty can take that, list of completed students that acknowledge and This is the first day of attendance. This is also your simple or your syllabus quiz.
So if you have problems, you have that as your acknowledgement. Yeah. So Okay. Okay. Where are you from? Okay.
So certainly, it it depends on the systems and things like that. But, in this case, so we work with an of schools where there is a centralized SIS and, different LMSs. First off, we don't necessarily need an integration with the SIS That typically enriches the data that we already have from the LMS. So things like the users, the accounts, the courses, this the the different offerings, the enrollments, we can all of that directly from Canvas through their API. When the SAS comes into play is if you wanna preload for the instructors, things like the building, the room, catalog description.
So you nest don't necessarily need to do any of that. It does enhance the value for your end users because it'll prepopulate take that and save them a bunch of time. Mhmm. I see. Yeah.
Magically happen. Out of magic. I don't magic. So So from for USF College of nurse, was my instructional design team, my assessment and evaluation team, and then we collaborated with USF IT team, which also is includes our campus administrator. So, my instructional design team was involved in making sure everything is set up correctly.
They tested and made sure from that standpoint, also looking at the policies, making sure those things are sort of correct. My assessment team is responsible for putting all the courses in banner for each college of nursing course, each Mester. So they put all that information in, and then the Canvas administrator, which works in USFIT, they may sure all the integrations behind the scene what happened. So I think we have Samuel or Samuel, something like that. He always say.
But he was responsible for making sure all that communication was happening. So if we noticed a mistake, we necessarily didn't go back to our Canvas administrator. I went back to my assessment team and say, Hey, this information is not pulling directly from banner correct. That means something is incorrect. So the team was vast in that nature with the instructional designers with the assessment team and the Canvas administrator.
And I'm not sure who he utilizes his team because he has a whole team that's ports him. Yes. Correct. Not eleven AM the next day. That is if we add a user or change the room number or prereqs things of that nature.
But if I make a change in a component, it happens immediately. So that's the difference. If I'm making a room change in banner. If I make a change in banner, that happens overnight. But everything else happens within simple that day.
So just for missed as, someone contacted me in the last week, my my d, academic being her new site. I can remember. She wanted to change in the syllabus. I verified it. May the condition change to that condition, that program, push it out, tow the falcon is going there, give it about ten minutes, grab a cup of coffee, and come back and check, and on number of courses that it has to impact, so it has to cycle through, but it automatically updates then.
And I'll just add to that. For instructors, when they make changes to their syllabus, it's instantaneous. If as an admin, you make it a a change and you're impacting three thousand syllabi, it's can take ten, fifteen minutes, to just run through and update them. The key is reminding your faculty is not a microwave. Give it a moment.
It will make the change. Just be patient. Or just as a collection or Can I answer it? That is my favorite feature sure is the reports. Because in our old solution, I had to go run the report and then give it to whoever needed it. So they were manually going checking every single syllabi to make sure that everything was still there because I could only see things from a certain point save.
But the reports inside of Simple syllabus allow there's a report editor or a report admin per mission, and I give that out, like, a lot. So, like, Dean's chairs, program directors. They can all go run their reports and see by part of term who has and hasn't done their solo And then there's also yes. And then if you go down, our favorite thing is, my colleague has figured out how like, I could call it hack, the document status report. You can add a whole bunch of different things and do reports off of that? Just just as a follow-up that, do you have, an API or an Yeah.
In addition to the reporting engine that's here, there is an API so you can query the information, build additional things beyond what we've provided. And we do have something that we're rolling out called SmartView, which is a custom report builder that'll export all this into PSVs in at predefined inch intervals. So the beautiful thing for people that's been using the word document, when you go to run that report, for accreditation standpoint, I have to have all of my, syllabus downloaded and ready and available for the creditors at site visit. So we normally would've been doing that through box have a person to go through each course. They have to look at them in the word document template, verify the course description outcome, objectives, major topics had not been changed.
Now we saved over thousands of hours from a person having to do that, and they would have to download it, put it on box. With this report and functionality here, you literally click a button, set your filters, do I wanna download all the completed syllabi in progress, whatever, and then you click a button, and it generates all of them as PDF in one folder in a matter of seconds. I then take that folder and just push it to box. So when our site visit come, we'll have them in box. But, likewise, our site visitors can go to this website and pull whichever syllabi they want down.
Is publicly available. So if you go to usf dot simple syllabus dot com, you can view every syllabi that we have created for the college of nursing. In the library. In the library. You can turn that off.
You have a you can turn that off if you want it publicly available or not, and they rolled that out right before we launched. Yeah. You can decide the scope of who all can access the library, whether it's just students and instructors or an admin or the general public, all of it's pretty granular. And the benefit there is to keep in mind the components. You can tell it if you want it visible public.
So keep it in mind for instructor information. If the instructors are putting their cell phone numbers, they may not want that publicly available. So at that point, we have the instructor information not publicly available. It's available to students enrolled in the course, but if you go to the public website, you would not see that your information. Yes.
Sure. We love that question. So we work with about three hundred colleges and universities, and the big that we've continually heard from our community. The thing that is big for them is the automation. And so what's unique to us is the ability to pull through Canvas, API, things like the days, or, excuse me, things like the assignments, the quizzes, the discussions, the due dates, pulling in all that information and pre building large parts of the syllabus for instructors so that they don't have to.
Addition to that, the configurability of the tool to meet a variety of different use cases, point in case the whole idea of conditional logic it's all about saving, stakeholders at the institution a tremendous amount of time. And maybe, I don't know if any of you speak to what stood out to you guys when when you went through the process. Okay. I'm being told to talk about, the support. We did several demos, and we were sold was simple on the day for day one.
Their integration within Canvas made it easy because it's all right there. But the biggest thing that sold me, one of our demos, we did not have a great demo. The audio was poor, and for me, that speak volume. They tells me that support may not be the greatest on the other end when I need it. But on with simple side, when I need support, just Monday, I was submitted help tickets.
And Eva, I think she does not take a break. She, as soon as the ticket comes in, she acknowledged and she's gonna give you a response within a few minutes. And she gives you a thorough response and she's available. So the support is amazing. The difference with other places, you may not get that support that quick, and it may not be, where they understand the problem and know the product.
So for me, it's not just the front end, it's the support on the back end and the quickness of that support. Of course. I talked I talked with Hope on Wednesdays. I've talked with John Austin on Fridays, and then I've talked with not Michael, not Mark. Tyler.
Tyler. Oh, I think Mondays. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Simple Sillas has office hours, and we stand in line and I'll make and I take away their lunch hour quite a bit. But also the faculty have the ability to submit, request and get help as well. So, during the so the faculty support is amazing as well. So the faculty can reach out to simple syllabus and talk to him within the syllabi. Yeah.
I think you were first. It is technically overwritten, but there is a changed history down at the bottom, and that that we encourage them to tell, especially on the templates where there might be multiple editors to let your other colleagues know what you made changes on. And they're quite great about, you know, locking each other out on different pieces and not changing and not can change this. So you're talking about the, like, Canvas cross listing? So we push from our banner SIS all of banner cross listed classes into individual sections. And our integration's a little bit different.
So we did our simple syllabus integration at the section level. So the sections students can see their individual section and not a merged, piece. So if we merged if we did our integration at the course level, they would have to see the the parent course syllabi. We did the cost list and we have the parent course, but the way we justify or modify that, the only thing that changes is section instructors. So we have them to list all the instructors on the master and just put their section number they were teaching.
Yes. In the process window right now, we also do at the section level. And for the instructors, because they're in multiple sections, so this doesn't really know what to do with them. So through Canvas, they get an error message, and they have to go to the simple dashboard. In order to pay the individual syllabus, and then they they're constantly asking us, like, well, what what are the students who don't know since we're only in one, so Silvis knows which one they're in, but because the teacher is in two, Silvis goes wanna send them in at home, throws up in Earth, which now we can customize a little bit, which is good, but it it's only text.
We'd we'd love to be able either, like, have a way for it to, like, to to dashboard directly or have some way of, like, having known that they're two options that I did. Yeah. So that was one of the things I've been meaning to put in to request. So that's one of the great things about simple syllabus is they're really listening to us. And so we we kind of reach out and go, Hey, this really great.
And so, we actually there's a document type now on our syllabus, because we wanted to be able to have templates versus the the syllabi themselves. So simple syllabus added that in the last feature release. Has been amazing. And then so I do have some ideas on how to improve the integration for those cross listed classes that when you, link on the section level versus the course level. Yep.
And I know we're running out of time here. So I think we got maybe we're going over. Maybe one more question, and then we'll all stay up here. And, if you have anything else, please certainly come come up in in CS. Yeah.
One point three? Yes. It does. It us, but that's probably a little bit of a long answer in terms of the different ways. Thank you all for coming.
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