The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map

Reviews / Votes

"[Nilson's] book... contains all sorts of amazingexamples which aren't designed to replace traditional syllabitext but to supplement it. If you are a visual learner and goodwith graphics, there's a real opportunity to get creativehere. "If there was one of these graphic representations in thesyllabus, on the course website or in a PowerPoint, it would be soeasy to haul it out at every major juncture in the course to givesome context to where we're going and how it relates to wherewe've been. It could be used in a very literal sense to helpstudents see the 'big picture' rather than experiencingthe course as a collection of seemingly separate topics. "In fact, this exercise need not be about just one course.Say there are two courses in a sequence or that one course is apre-requisite to another. Rather than just saying that the coursesare related, those relationships could be shown. It's a wayof getting students to understand that courses make artificialboundaries between content areas that are inextricably linked. Itmight also be a way of increasing the number of connections facultycould build between what students learned in one course and whatthey are studying in the next one. The possibilities are quiteintriguing." --Maryellen Weimer, Teaching Professor Blog