This  Syllabus Essentials Guide provides framing and student-facing policy language for all required syllabus elements as well as other sections that you may wish to consider in crafting and communicating your distinctive course policies. The webpage for this resource also features a downloadable and accessible Word document version.

Visit the Syllabus Essentials Guide

Canvas course templates are designed to save you time, ensure consistency, and incorporate best practices in instructional design and accessibility. Whether you’re teaching online, hybrid, or in-person, UO Online's Canvas course templates offer a flexible and structured approach to course design..

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This customizable module orients students to the organization and content of the course. It supports clearer course navigation—a need many students identified last year. It also features opportunities for you to introduce yourself to students, for students to introduce themselves to one another, and for students to easily find both academic and non-academic supports on campus.

Explore the Welcome Module

This module directs student communications about absences to a single place in Canvas. Weekly absence surveys (a) link to key course and UO policy, (b) ask students to identify both the week's absence and total absences (to encourage their awareness of where they fall in the policy), (c) include weekly highlighted "UO dates to know," featuring supportive student resources/events, as well as any relevant academic deadlines for things like withdrawing from or adding a class, and (d) ask students to answer several questions about how they plan to keep up with the course, to activate their agency in planning and decision-making.

The surveys are designed not to require responses from faculty; they direct students who wish to receive support in the course—support unrelated to the absence and makeup policy—to email the instructor.

Find the Report Absences Here Module

This customizable module engages students with questions around what academic integrity is and why it matters—both to UO, and to them. Students who entered UO in the last two years will have taken a detailed Academic Integrity module as part of IntroDUCKtion (a module made by the same collaborators who created this one). Adding "Academic Integrity" to your course and customizing it for your context can help strengthen and refresh that initial guidance for students.

This module has been updated with brief guidance for students around generative AI, the importance of understanding each instructor's policy on whether generative AI has a appropriate role in the work of the class, and information about the risks of using it inappropriately.

Get the Module in Canvas Commons