Every Aalto course to have a course syllabus

The course syllabus is an instrument that allows for the continual development of teaching and courses in the lengthened curriculum period.

At the same time, publishing time of the teaching has been brought forward. Course descriptions for the curriculum 2018-2020 will be published 1st of June, 2018 in WebOodi. At the same time the teaching schedule for the academic year 2018-2019 is also published. With this reform our students are able to plan their studies for the next academic year in good time and MyCourses course spaces are created for the teachers before the summer vacations.

The curriculum contains the basic confirmed information about courses as well as the intended learning outcomes and the core contents for the two academic years. Course teaching and evaluation methods, and the relationship between contact teaching to independent work are also defined in the curriculum.

In different implementations of the course, however, it is possible to change the amount of lectures relative to other contact teaching, or the ‘weight’ given to different methods of evaluation. For example, one course implementation may have 25 h of lectures, 15 h of laboratory work and a 10 h excursion, while a different implementation of the same course may have 15 h, 30 h and 5 h, respectively. Similarly, the evaluation in the first implementation may be based 30% on assignments and 70% on the examination, whereas the second may be 60% and 40%, respectively.

The course syllabus is a new tool to enable the information confirmed in the curriculum to be elaborated in detail for a specific implementation of a course. The syllabus is written in a MyCourses workspace into a ready-made template. The information is saved automatically to Oodi, from which it can be read by other Aalto systems. The course syllabus supplements the curriculum. Course contact information, the required details on course content and on teaching and evaluation methods, compulsory course material and calculated student workload must be ready at least three weeks before the start of the course. Information about optional course material and about the schedule may be supplemented in the syllabus during the time of the course.

The course syllabus will go into production with the upgrading of MyCourses on 18 June 2018. From then on, course workspaces can be edited for the 2018–19 academic year. Small adjustments to the tool are made continuously.

The introduction of the course syllabus has been prepared by the Student Services specialist team Oopas together with Aalto IT, Aalto University ICT for Learning (OPIT) and teaching staff.