Abstract
"It’s in the syllabus!" is a familiar refrain for both students and professors. For professors, experiences with students who often (and repeatedly) ask questions that have already been answered by the course syllabus, causes frustration. For students, it seems that too often professors ignore the reality that course syllabi are Byzantine documents the eschew any sense of design, audience, or engagement for the sake of delivering the bureaucratic minutiae of a class and university. |Syllabi are boring to write and read, and they recede into the periphery of a course rapidly. Course syllabi are simultaneously essential and useless.| In the Fall of 2016, Dr. Guy McHendry (Communication Studies) piloted an online, interactive, syllabus built on the Qualtrics survey platform in COM: 440 Gender Communication. In subsequent semesters, Dr. Kathy Gonzales (Interdisciplinary Studies) joined McHendry in testing this syllabus. Together, McHendry and Gonzales have explored the value of the interactive syllabus in a variety of courses (undergraduate, graduate, face to face, and online).