Humanizing Pre-Course Contact with a Liquid Syllabus

Please view the 3-minute video below to consider a few of the benefits of a Liquid Syllabus:

A humanized online course applies equity-minded language to course information but extends the transformation one step further.  Humanizing involves designing a Liquid Syllabus that is created using a website tool (Google Sites, Adobe Express Page, Wordpress, etc.) that can be viewed by students without logging in to a Learning Management System (LMS) or other secured environments (Pacansky-Brock, 2014b, 2017). By using a tool that is native to the online environment, a Liquid Syllabus responds to a student’s viewing device, rendering clearly scrollable text when viewed on a smartphone phone and maximizes an online instructor’s first impression on students. Depending on the device settings, students may also be able to make text larger and opt for a dark view, which is easier to view in low-light settings.

A Liquid Syllabus also provides unique opportunities for fostering social presence. A syllabus created with a website creation tool allows instructors to embed a brief, captioned video on the page, ensuring students have the opportunity to be greeted with a warm, smiling face and hear supportive words prior to reading the content (more like a face-to-face classroom experience).

Digital images can be easily interspersed through a Liquid Syllabus to establish a welcoming tone and to more effectively support the understanding of content by students from different cultural backgrounds who represent diverse groups of people. Instructors of humanized courses send a pre-course email to students during the week prior to a course that includes a link to the Liquid Syllabus. Students who read this email on a smartphone may click the link, be welcomed by their instructor, and have direct access to the information they need to start day one on the right foot.

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This page is adapted with permission from Pacansky-Brock, M., Smedshammer, M., & Vincent-Layton, K. (2020). Humanizing Online Teaching to Equitize Higher Education Links to an external site.. Current Issues in Education, 21(2).