My course websites used to be public, but I got tired of others taking my design work w/o permission or attribution. Now most of my courses are password protected. I hadn’t really thought about my syllabi until last year when I designed and taught a particularly novel course. It’s a gamified design and is largely a culmination of my own 35 years of experience in teaching as well as the kind of design that Charles Reigeluth talks about when he talks about a paradigm change in education. I started thinking about my syllabi and the course designs they describe as scholarly work worthy of attribution. I have a growing number of publications that come from the novel aspects of the design of this course. I was annoyed when I discovered that the person who taught the course after me took many aspects of my design without any mention of where they came from. I have long included attributions on my syllabi and assignment specifications to credit those whose ideas I built upon. Apparently, this is not common, and that’s wrong. It’s especially annoying when faculty in Education fail to acknowledge the colleagues and scholars upon whose work they are building, yet I’ve seen that done more times than I can count. I’ve had elements of my own designs “borrowed” without either permission or attribution. You’d think that professors of education of all people should recognize that course design is scholarly work. These are the same people who insist on proper reference style on almost everything their students submit, claiming that proper attribution is an important part of ethical professional practice. Apparently, ethical professional practice only applies to *some* people and *some* scholarly work. Once again, it’s reassuring to know that I’m not the only one who thinks this is an issue: Citing Syllabi – ProfHacker – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I thinkDerek Bruff puts it very well in a comment on George’s posting: “The acknowledgement issue is a delicate one. We have standard ways to acknowledge the research and scholarship done by others (citations and such), but we don’t have any standards or norms around attribution of teaching materials or methodologies. I kind of wish we did, since giving credit where credit is due (a) is generally an ethical thing to do and (b) might result in better institutional recognition of contributions to the teaching profession.” A similar discussion is found in the comments to Brian’s post on Forking your Syllabus. Katherine D. Harris has discussed the issue of Acknowledgments on Syllabi in a nice posting which also highlights the many different ways we can learn from these pedagogical gold nuggets. As she points out, with examples, a growing number of online syllabi do include an acknowledgements section. I will be adding some to my own courses as I revise and create new ones this year.

Here are a few of Konrad Lawson‘s suggestions:

• When you write your syllabus, include the year and semester it was taught. This can serve as a version number, and will allow different versions to be acknowledged accordingly.
• Consider uploading your syllabus somewhere relatively stable online, to reduce the chances of link rot or keep versions alive online where search engines can find them. Upload, for example, to archive.org or to github.com, or somewhere your university it unlikely to take it down. Remember LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe).
• Consider adding a Creative Commons or other open license to your syllabus somewhere explicitly so that, beyond “fair use” and the un-copyrightable nature of ideas, others can feel comfortable adopting and modifying (with attribution) larger chunks of, say, your assignment descriptions or class policies.
• Consider putting the above info in a convenient meta-data section at the bottom of your syllabus so that it can be easily found, or as an additional file alongside it if it is in a repository (for example, on github). Hopefully, if this catches on, it might further facilitate the kind of larger scale work by projects such as the Open Syllabus Project. Other useful metadata to include there might be some keywords related to your course, its level of difficulty, the expected size of the class, whether it is a lecture, seminar, etc. course, and other basic info that might found elsewhere throughout the syllabus such as the instructor, university, course title, and version.
• As sharing of syllabi becomes more common, we will be more conscious of “other readers” beyond our students of the document. One question those readers will often ask themselves, as they decide whether they want to adopt some of your readings, policies, or assignment types, or other material is: did it work? What worked well, and what needed more refinement? The answer to these questions can sometimes be detected in the changes from one syllabus to the next when multiple years are available, but a “changelog” of some kind indicating what bugs were fixed and new features added can be useful, even if, like the “changelog” of computer code, it is just a quick list of bullet points.
• When acknowledging other syllabi, be specific, and if a digital version of your syllabi exists, include a link (but also enough words from the title and year to enable a targeted search if the link no longer works).

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