Course Masters & Course Sections

Special Note: For Simple Syllabus Course Designers.

Here you find descriptions and details about 1) What is a Course Master, 2) What is the difference between a Course Master and Course Sections, and 3) What happens when updating a course master after a section-level syllabus has been published and how to update the section-level syllabus to inherit the course master update(s.)

What is a Course Master?

Simple Syllabus users designated as Designers have access to update course masters which they have been granted privileges. Users who are assigned the designer role will see a ‘Course Masters’ tab when they log in, and this is where they will be able to edit syllabi for courses in which they are the designer.

A Course Master in Simple Syllabus refers to a document that lives at the course level and impacts syllabi for ALL sections of that course.  As an example, let's say that ENG 101 is a course with three sections: ENG 101-01, ENG 101-02, and ENG 101-03. 

ENG 101 has a course designer who is in charge of editing the Course Master for ENG 101. 

When the course designer makes changes to the ENG 101 Course Master, those changes will propagate out to the syllabi for ENG 101-01, ENG 101-02, and ENG 101-03. 

The Course Master does not need to be published every term since content will automatically roll over into each new term. 

What is the difference between a course and a section?

An example of a course would be ENG 101. This particular course offering may have a variety of sections available for students to enroll in; such as ENG 101-01, ENG 101-02, ENG 101-03. Each of these sections will also have an assigned instructor.

In Simple Syllabus, a section is a specific instance of a course. For every course section, there is a syllabus generated. The syllabi found in the Syllabus Library all live at the section level.

Depending on an institution's academic practices, section syllabi may follow a Course Master syllabus. For those schools that follow this practice, they will utilize Course Masters within Simple Syllabus. In doing so, the course, ENG 101, would have a document that lives at the course level and impacts all the syllabi for each section of that course. This will then allow section syllabi to inherit pertinent content about the course (ENG 101), while still giving instructors of individual sections (ENG 101-01, ENG 101-02, ENG 101-03) the ability to further personalize syllabus content for their particular class, at the section level.

What happens when updating a course master after the syllabi have been published?

Suppose a course section has already been submitted and published and a change(s) was made to a component in the course master afterward. In that case, the corresponding component in the course section Simple Syllabus must be reset to inherit the course master change(s.)

This is an example of a course master and a course section that are complete. It is easy to distinguish a course master from a course section. The course master does not have a section letter. The course section has a section letter A associated with it.

After adding this text to the Course Goals and Student Learning Objectives component and submitting this course master, the course section will not inherit this update until the Course Goals and Student Learning Objectives component in the course section is reset.

Course Master

Course Section & Reset