A course syllabus and course bookone source for the syllabus, the weekly readings and next term

Method

1. 1

   Gather the front matter before you start

   Gather four things: last term’s syllabus, the learning objectives as the department approved them, the grading scheme exactly as it stands in the LMS, and this term’s required statements from your institution’s syllabus template — accessibility and disability services, academic integrity, Title IX, and whatever else your campus asks for.

   Keep the required statements to one side. They change between terms, they are not yours to paraphrase, and they should not pass through an assistant for tidying. You will paste them in yourself, word for word.

2. 2

   Have your assistant build the course book

   Give your assistant last term’s syllabus: attach the file in Claude or ChatGPT, or point a local client at it. Ask it to make a shelf, SOC 101 Introduction to Sociology, and a document on it, SOC 101 syllabus and course book. The overview takes the front matter under plain headings: Course description, Learning objectives (numbered LO1 to LO5), Grading, Policies, Use of AI in this course. Then one finding per week, from Week 1 — What is sociology? to Week 16 — Final exam, each with the same four parts:

   • Readings, with chapter and page numbers and a link to the library’s e-reserve page.
   • Objectives: which of LO1 to LO5 the week serves.
   • Discussion prompts: three questions for Thursday’s seminar.
   • Due this week, as the LMS has it.

   Sixteen findings arrive in a few minutes. Every one is a draft to check.

3. 3

   Fix it up in the editor

   Open the document and press Edit. Paste the required statements into the overview under their own heading, word for word from the template. Then read week by week: correct page numbers, check every due date against the LMS, mark the midterm and paper weeks Key, and change anything still undecided to a Question. Drag a week into a new place if the schedule moved.

   Open each week with a sentence naming its thinkers: “This week we read Cooley and Mead on the self.” The index learns single names that recur in finding titles and first lines, so Durkheim, Goffman and Mills each lead to the weeks that read them. Concepts such as anomie never become index terms; find them with Look up (⌘K), which searches every word.

4. 4

   Ask your assistant whether every objective is assessed

   Ask your assistant to read SOC 101 syllabus and course book and map each learning objective to the weeks that teach it and the assessments that grade it, quoting the lines that show it. Have it file the result as a new finding, Objectives and assessments, with a table, so you can read it beside the weeks rather than in a chat.

   Treat it as a checklist, not a verdict. The assistant sees only what you wrote: if the midterm does test LO3 but the syllabus never says so, it will call LO3 unassessed. Either way you learn something. Fix the gap in the course or the gap in the description, and keep the finding, out of the students’ link, for the next time the department asks about alignment.

5. 5

   Draft discussion prompts, then make them yours

   Discussion prompts go stale faster than anything else in a syllabus. Ask your assistant for five candidate prompts on a week, tied to something a first-year student sees on campus, written in a margin note on that week rather than in its text. Keep one, rewrite another, discard the rest.

   Unless you have given it the chapter, the assistant works from your summaries and page references. Check every prompt against the reading before you use it. A prompt about a claim the author never made costs ten minutes of a seminar.

6. 6

   Share one link and post it in the LMS

   When the syllabus reads well, press Share, leave it with no expiry (the default), and copy the link the moment it appears: know.sh shows it once. From each finding’s own page, leave out Objectives and assessments and anything still marked Question. Post the link on the course home page in the LMS and on the first-day slides.

   Students see the overview and the weeks, each with its type and importance, and none of your notes or highlights. They cannot write back through it; questions arrive by email or in office hours, as before. If the registrar wants a file, copy the text into the department’s template once a term. The link is the version you keep correcting.

7. 7

   Roll it forward to next term

   At the end of term, read through the weeks and leave yourself notes beside the lines they are about: “The Durkheim excerpt ran long; use the shorter one”, “Week 11, prompt 2 never worked”. Notes are private, so they can be blunt.

   For the new term, give your assistant the new calendar and ask it to update every date in the same document; then paste the new required statements yourself and act on your notes. There is no need for a copy. Each week’s revisions keep last term’s wording, marked as yours or the assistant’s, and Restore puts it back. Finally, open Share and replace the link, so last term’s students are not reading next term’s schedule. Replacing resets the expiry and the left-out findings, so set them again.