Teaching: Giving Students Better Information Before They Sign Up for Class — from chronicle.com by Beth McMurtrie
Excerpt:
A New Tool for Course Transparency
The days when students flipped through course catalogues to determine what they wanted to study are long over. So why do so many colleges continue to provide students only brief course descriptions on which to base their enrollment decisions? Couldn’t those descriptions be much more expansive online, including course-material costs, a syllabus, and even a professor’s statement of their teaching philosophy?
Why?
Particularly now, students require information about classes as they plan their upcoming semester to find the best fit for their learning. Course descriptions rarely provide all the information students seek around class structure, attendance, cost, and more. Completing this not only serves as a communication mechanism for prospective students, it may reduce the number of emails and drop/adds to your course. (source)