Sometimes my students just don’t know how lucky they are. The reason for their luck came as a surprise to me because it was one of those functional things that I simply overlooked while actually planning my own course. It makes sense, from a distribution standpoint, that in a class with over four hundred people you would distribute course materials in a digital format. It’s faster, harder to lose, and wastes significantly fewer trees in the process. What’s not to like?
Apparently there is a lot not to like and I’m quite certain that I’ve experienced this dilemma with some of my own instructors. The argument goes something like this: I own the syllabus. This comes in a variety of forms and rationales but at the end of the day the decision to refuse to provide a digital copy of a syllabus is one surrounded by the idea of ownership.
I’ll refrain from getting too far into the idea of ownership (and copyright law, etc…) and simply talk about the advantages of a digital syllabus as I have personally experienced. As an instructor for such a large course I simply wouldn’t have the heart to print out 400+ copies of a 10+ page syllabus (that would be 4000+ pages!) because that amount of waste is clearly not needed. As a student, though, you will always have access to the syllabus. If you left it in your dorm room but need it over vacation in another country you can access it from the web, or in an e-mail, or on a flash drive. Isn’t that easy and valuable?
I’m experiencing the pains of my non-digital copies currently as I prep for my doctoral exams. I will be tested over each of the courses I’ve taken over the past 4+ years and I have yet to locate all of the syllabi from those courses. If they were digital files I would have them in e-mail. Instead, I’m stuck looking through boxes and notebooks. You could make the argument that I’m just not very organized but I have a counter argument: my computer is cleaner than yours. Since things are moving digital (for better or for worse) I’m living in the present and looking towards the future: what are you doing?