Visuals
The goal of a warm and welcoming syllabus is ensure all students feel included. When creating a Liquid Syllabus, break up the text on your pages with color and images. Visuals can be a great way to curb feelings of anxiety. When you select images of people, ensure the people represented in the images reflect the student population that you serve. Look for images that convey cues of hope and progress towards achieving the learning goals for the course.
Google Sites makes creating a visually-oriented syllabus very easy! This course will include specific image databases that intentionally incorporate images of diverse people and lots of other types of images. Feel free to take your own images too and incorporate those into your Liquid Syllabus (that's a great way to humanize your students' learning and show that you care about your course).
Accessibility
This course will also ensure that you understand how to include images that will be accessible to all viewers of your Liquid Syllabus. Screenreaders are assistive technology devices used by people who are blind to navigate digital content. A screenreader scans a webpage and reads the content to the user. When an image is identified on a page, the screenreader reads the "alt-text" (short for "alternative text") that the webpage creator (that's you!) included along with the image. The alt-text ensures that the meaning conveyed through the image can be accessed by all people.
Attributions
As college professors, it is important to model attribution when using existing content created by another person. Images are just like articles, music, and other types of content. They have an author. How and if you need to attribute the creator of an image depends on the type of copyright license the creator has applied to the image.
To ensure you abide by an image's copyright license, search for images on an image repository (like Unsplash) so you can clearly identify the type of copyright license an image has been shared with. Identify the use re-use terms on the site and follow them when you include an image in your Liquid Syllabus. Unsplash, for example, encourages attribution but does not require it (the image below includes two images from Unsplash without attribution). This is ok to do in accordance with the copyright license that creators use when they upload their photographs to Unsplash, but it would be ideal to include attributions for all content that is not yours. This course will guide you towards including images with attribution.
This is a screenshot of Jamie Thomas' Liquid Syllabus from Santa Monica College.