Franske Dynamic Syllabi

Syllabi on this site may be dynamic web documents which pull information from a variety of current templates to provide the most up-to-date and accurate information about a course. This means the pages are constantly changing based on the information, policies and other details in these templates which are automatically applied to multiple syllabi. A syllabus will not reflect the syllabus at the beginning or end of a specific term or course, but rather, the most current information for that course. Changes to each page and template are logged and date stamped automatically so it is possible to reconstruct the page at a given date, but it is not as simple as checking the history of this page, you must also check the history of each included template.

The particular sections of a syllabus which are dynamically generated based on templates vary from course to course though it's a good bet that at least instructor contact information and campus policies are dynamically generated.

Syllabi which contain dynamic information contain a warning that they reflect current information and not the information for a specific term as well as a link to this explanation page.

Examples

The instructor contact information for dynamic syllabi is pulled from a template with information about office hours and contact methods for the current term. Office hours change each term so the office hours displayed are always for the current term regardless of when you took the class.

The grading scale for a class may also be pulled from a template. It is possible, then, that when you took the class the syllabus stated that an "A" was 90% and the syllabus now states that an "A" requires 93%. If you want to see what the syllabus looked like when you took the class you will need to read the section on reviewing old syllabi.

Reviewing Old Syllabi

Because syllabi are stored on the wiki all previous versions of any given page are automatically saved and timestamped. In theory this makes it easy to look at an old version of a page (just click on the "History" tab of any page). Unfortunately, dynamic pages which pull information (called transcluding in Wikispeak) from other pages (called templates in Wikispeak) somewhat complicate the process for looking at old versions of pages. This is a particular concern with syllabi which are the governing documents for a course.

If you need to find a complete copy of a syllabus at a given point in time you can still do so but you will have to do the transcluding by hand and look at the history of the syllabus itself as well as every page which is transcluded and manually merge them together. You will need to start with the syllabus page itself and view the source for the specific historical version for the date you are interested in. You will then need to look at each section of the syllabus where templates have been transcluded into the page and individually look at the history of each template for the version which was current on the date of interest and copy that information into the syllabus itself. If a template transcludes another template (this can sometimes go several levels deep) you will need to manually check the history of each transcluded template for it's contents on the date of interest.

If you are only interested in a specific section of the syllabus (grading policy, for instance) you can check the syllabus history itself of the date of interest to verify it was a dynamic section of the syllabus on that date. Assuming it was you then only need to check the history of that particular template (and any templates which were transcluded into it).

If you are concerned about this and plan in advance you can simply save a copy (as a PDF, for example) a copy of the syllabus on your own computer at the beginning and end of the course.