by Nick Monk, Director, Center for Transformative Teaching
I have recently been building my Fall course 189H, "Putting the 'I' in Identity: Sociology and the Self." One of the areas to which I devoted time and energy was the syllabus. I wanted students to know that the syllabus is a guide to the course, the 'instructions' if you like. I also wanted them to know why I had structured things the way I had in terms of sequencing, modules, assessment, attendance etc., and finally I wanted the syllabus to show them how to be successful in the course.
This broad "What, Why, How" strategy is from Flower Darby's book Small Teaching Online and is a useful guide to many aspects of one's teaching. Of course, these ambitions are all well and good in the abstract, but the challenge at this point is how do I get students to understand what I understand - that this is an important collection of materials that will help them do well? Put another way, how do I check student comprehension on the syllabus? Nagging is futile, taking a class period to focus on the syllabus might be effective but feels as though plodding through a collection of rules and regulations sets the wrong tone in a class where active learning is emphasized. Where I finished up was with a syllabus quiz.
There is nothing particularly innovative about this, as I know lots of instructors use such quizzes. My problem was that it can be laborious and tedious to compile ten questions, each with five answers, in a quiz format. I decided, therefore, to run my syllabus through AI - ChatGPT 4o.
What I got in seconds was a ten-question quiz that addressed really important parts of the syllabus. I checked the questions, of course, for hallucinations or errors and there were none. The questions themselves ranged from where the classroom is located to what is the AI policy, and I'd say that I would have produced the equivalent myself in about an hour. Fifty-eight minutes longer than ChatGPT. All that's needed now is a direct interface with Canvas and I could have saved myself the bother of copying and pasting the quiz into new quizzes.