I’m only taking two classes per term for my master’s degree because I’m still working full time while going to school. Thus far balancing school work and paid employment has actually been pretty easy. What I want to talk about today is the difference between the two classes I’m taking, and how the professors approach the idea of workload as expressed in their syllabi.
My first class is “Knowledge and Information in Society,” and it’s a kind of general policy and issues class built around understanding the many different facets of this nebulous concept we call “information.” The assignments are very well structured and lead one to the other in a very satisfying and logical way, but the issues we cover are all over the place. Fascinating in themselves, but they don’t really lead to a coherent “story” of what information is, or how it functions in our society from a theoretical standpoint—more of a snapshot of compelling contemporary issues, each with their own competing ideas about these things, seldom in direct conversation with each other. I feel very at home in this course; I own and have read several of the books on the syllabus, I have prior graduate-level training in some of the analytical techniques, and the issues we cover are of significant interest to me. The reading list, however, is huge. It’s divided into four sections: Required Readings, Current Controversy Readings, Worth a Look Readings, and Module Readings. The Required section is self evident, and there are anywhere from 3 to 5 per week. Current Controversy Readings are related to discussion assignments we must write short reaction pieces for, five throughout the course, so we don’t need to read them every week; there are between 5 and 10 readings every week. Worth a Look readings are supplemental to the Required list, and there are often 5 or more. Module Readings are supplemental to both the Required and Current Controversy Readings, and can include video materials. If I were to do all of those readings in a single week, it might amount to about 1,000 pages and a couple hours of video. The professor for this course has been very clear that we are to pick and choose from these readings, that we are not to read them all. She’s been teaching this course for a long time, and adds readings to the syllabus every year without every purging them. She wants us to have as many resources as possible, and as much choices as possible when deciding on the topics of our assignments. The more material she can introduce us to upfront to poke through at our leisure, the less difficulty we’ll have finding something relevant to the course that interests us.
My second class is called “Information Systems, Services, and Design,” and is a bit more technically oriented. We discuss information systems in the abstract, ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies), data modelling, and so on. I have very little experience in this area, and have had to pay very close attention in class. The assignments are designed in a nearly identical way to my other course in that they flow into each other in a very logical and satisfying way, allowing us to build on previous work and learning in the course, rather than dividing our learning into discrete “chunks” and then testing us on it all at the end. My professor for this course takes a completely different approach to readings. He has also been teaching this course for many years, and he has winnowed the reading list down to only the barest essentials; it’s not unusual for there to be only 1 reading for a given week, or even none. He will sometimes use short, pre-recorded lectures to help break things up so we aren’t stuck in a classroom trying to absorb a firehose of information for hours at a time. Anything non-essential has been mercilessly scrubbed from the syllabus. He has a very clear idea of what he wants us to come away with from the course, and it’s important to him that we aren’t pushed in other directions by materials that aren’t absolutely necessary.
I see the value in, and respect, both approaches to constructing a syllabus. My own impulse would be to take the first approach; there is always something else out there worthwhile to engage with, and if you can’t get to it now, save it for when you have time later. But when I think about things like which class I’m enjoying the most, which class I’m getting the most learning done in, and which class is causing me the most stress, the answer surprises me. I’m enjoying “Knowledge and Information in Society” the most, probably because the subject matter is exactly the kind of thing I want to be working on, and because my prior experience with both the methods and some of the specific materials has prepared me to do well in it. But it’s also the class that’s causing me the most stress, and it is in fact “Information Systems, Services, and Design” where the most learning is happening. There’s the obvious issue that because I’m so less experienced with the nature of ISSD that there’s more to learn, and that’s true, but I think there’s more to it than that.
I am aware that I am not expected to read all the materials in the syllabus for “Knowledge and Information in Society.” I’m not even expected to read most of them. And yet the presence of these materials on the syllabus sets up a kind of tension between that knowledge, my own desire to get as much as possible from this educational experience, and the actual classroom sessions themselves. I can choose which readings I want to engage with, but will they be the same ones that will be covered in class? Will I show up and be unprepared? Will I be missing something thing vital if I skip reading X instead of reading Y? Accompanying this level of choice is an anxiety around incompleteness; not quite FOMO, but that I’ve never done enough to be keeping up with the class or the assignments. No matter how well ahead I am on my work I am haunted by a constant feeling of being behind, and it’s a significant distraction from learning. With the incredibly limited syllabus of “Information Systems, Services, and Design,” however, I always know where I am in relation to the professor’s expectations, I always know what the course’s learning objectives are (which are not always the same as my own—it’s important to understand and satisfy both), and how to engage if I want or need more. I’m able to focus on learning what I’m there to learn instead of the administrative tasks of student life.
I’d never really thought of a syllabus in this way before, not just as reference document but as a kind of artful thing with its own skill requirements and qualities of refinement. A syllabus isn’t synonymous with its course, but its design has a non-trivial influence on how students experience that course.
