There are some perks to only having class Mondays and Wednesdays. For example, when there’s a national holiday that falls on a Monday like Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I have a whole week vacation! Over my mini-vacation, I got to thinking about how much paper is wasted during the first week of classes, not only at this university but nationwide.

The first week of classes has become dubbed “syllabus week” because you know every class is going to waste a day or the week going over the syllabus. It’s pathetic teachers still have to read it to the students instead of letting them review it on their own time. It’s downright wasteful some teachers still feel the need to print out syllabi to hand out like the internet was never invented.

At IU, we have an online collaborative learning environment called Oncourse that is so revolutionary it includes a built in tool for teachers to (gasp) post their syllabus! Why doesn’t everyone do this? Why aren’t they required to? Here’s one example from one of my classes this semester of how useful and thrifty posting the syllabus online would have been.

The professor sent out an email the week before class started with the syllabus attached. Good start, but it was filled with errors (i.e. Spring Break was scheduled in February) and it was attached as a Word document. Why couldn’t she copy and paste all that plain text into the email?

On the first day of class, she prepared 40 stapled copies of the same 4 page erroneous syllabus to hand out. Instead of relying on the competence of her students to manually correct her errors, she collected them all and handed out fresh corrected copies in the next class. Today, our third time meeting, she had us make another correction!

Instead of wasting 320 pages of papers, she could have simply written her syllabus in Oncourse’s WYSIWYG editor. If she makes an error or wants to change around some dates, she can do it instantly and send out an announcement that there has been a change to the syllabus. No printing off, stapling, and handing out another version or having me keep track of a packet of paper for 5 months to continually mark up with changes.

In the future, I hope she saves herself some trouble, saves the rainforest a few trees, and saves me the headache of trying to keep it all straight. Get smart, simplify, go green, and just put it online!