Creating a Syllabus with Canva

The end of summer is always a period of mixed emotion for teachers. Excitement, curiosity, and anxiety all blend together as we wonder where the time went and look forward to shifting our lives one more time. As part of this process, many of us are probably starting to consider new ideas for curriculum, and new ways to support students as they engage in exciting experiences. And always, we revise our syllabuses (or syllabi if you prefer). The syllabus is nominally for students, but it’s also the place where we do much of our initial thinking about the year to come, considering what texts to include, what rules to put in place, how to describe our courses to students for the first time, and how to welcome them into our classrooms.

After hours or days of careful planning and thinking though, the syllabus can often become an uninspiring list of requirements, rules, and course descriptions that, however carefully they may be crafted, are quickly skimmed over by students looking for more meaty information about big assignments or grades. In this post, I’d like to discuss how we might use digital tools to enliven these first documents our students encounter in our classes, at the same time teaching ourselves a platform that can later be used by both students and teachers to compose and share material in aesthetically engaging ways.

I’m talking here about Canva, a web-based design program that allows even total novices to create beautiful pages for the web or for print. Certainly there are many such tools available, but I’ll keep the focus limited here. We have enough to worry about as the year begins without pouring over a thousand different graphic design engines. And Canva is a pretty solid choice for a teacher or student – you can quickly create materials that are engaging and informative without needing to invest a graduate degree’s worth of time to learn it. 

But before I move on, some brief examples. Have you ever handed out a syllabus that looks like this?

What about one that looks like this?

A syllabus cover sheet for my English 9 class. Image from Journey

This one was created on Canva. It’s a wonderful way for any of us to consider the aesthetics of the information we share with others. Increasingly, as publishing materials to the web becomes more and more a standard mode of communication, even in schools, tools like Canva allow us to think through the materials we share with students on an aesthetic level and to consider the immediate effect they might have on students. This is especially true of a syllabus; our students receive this document with little knowledge about us or our classes. And yet, so often, the unintended message, beyond whatever we want to convey, is that this is a class, perhaps a required one, and it will be filled with  requirements. There will be rules and grades and things kids have to do. Of course, much of that information is important! But we can also convey it in ways that might grab someone’s attention, that might spark their curiosity or invite them to engage with a subject. You might even use a syllabus as a text or a tool for inquiry and discussion!

To use Canva, you simply choose from a number of provided templates or start fresh, dragging and dropping elements (text box, image, background, etc.) from a menu on the left side of the screen. The easiest way to create a cool design is to start with one of Canva's templates and adjust it until it fits your purpose, replacing placeholder text and images with ones relevant to your course. 

You begin by choosing a template or starting from a blank one. You can design materials for print or for the web. Any document you create can be downloaded as a PDF or JPG file that can be sent to students, printed, or embedded in a website.

The image above highlights different textual elements that can be included. Notice how much of the design work has been completed already, with different fonts and text sizes ready to be added.

Now, of course, you can't print this in any remotely cost effective way. I've distributed these to my students digitally, but I've also taught in schools in which technology access was an issue. Still, color and full page images are not the only ways to create well-designed documents. Here is an example of the front page of a syllabus in black and white with no images.

This document was designed for a senior creative writing elective and includes a short prose poem from internet phenom J. Raymond. Here, the front page becomes not just informational, but also serves as a classroom activity. A text is embedded in the syllabus itself and serves both as an invitation into the course and material for a classroom activity. 

In this post, I've focused exclusively on the use of Canva as a tool for syllabus creation. However, using it for a syllabus is only one of many applications. At the very least, by playing around with this tool yourself, you gain familiarity with the program and could create materials for your classes down the line or help your students learn to use this tool for their own projects or applications. Kids in my classes have created posters to promote their classroom magazine, designed their own creative projects, and created covers for collections of their work. The possibilities are as unlimited as the creativity of you and your students.

At the same time, there are some limitations to be aware of. As I mentioned above, there are few schools that could afford to print these materials and of course you need access to technology to work with them. On the other side of the equation, as you get more involved in web-based design, you may want to create more interactive, elaborate materials or ask your students to create them. For such activities, I would suggest website creation tools such as Wordpress or Weebly. Lastly, while Canva provides a variety of designs, templates, and images for free, and allows you to upload your own, there are some images, fonts, or designs that cost money. If you are using this with students, you'll want to cover this in class before discovering that some excited student has spent two-hundred dollars downloading new templates.