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!