Hacker News Reader

Comment by kowdermeister | Hacker News Reader

In my country you can't function like a normal school if your syllabus needs to be accredited and it's not easy to change it.

We didn't really drop anything, an extra day appeared because they were already better prepared before starting the course with basic materials.

View on HN

When I went to a university, they got around this by making the syllabi as vague as humanly possible. They even would have a spare course code in each department which was just "whatever the professor feels like teaching, and if it's popular we'll turn it into a real course". Syllabi would avoid specifying the exact languages/frameworks/technologies taught in class.

We had something like that at UToronto Scarborough campus in philosophy. We had independent study course codes which were fourth year course codes where a student or small group of students could work with a prof to develop a custom course. Was amusing in that I think when I started studying there they only had I think four codes, but a friend of mine was there an extra two years and had taken everything upper level basically and they had to make new course codes for him.

My university (in the United States) had a course code like this, except that it was allowed to be repeated so you could take it a number of times under the same course code.

UPenn has that. I took CIS 399 ("Special Topics in Computer Science") once as "Unix/Linux Skills" and once as a Python course. From googling I see that it's also been offered as "The Art of Recursion", "Open Source Software Development", and other titles. It is a half-credit course, i.e. half of a normal course.

I don't see the problem.

A syllabus -- per dictionary.com, "an outline or other brief statement of the main points of a discourse, the subjects of a course of lectures, the contents of a curriculum, etc." -- is required by a governing authority that presumably has an interest in what citizen/subject (per your local regime) are being taught. This seems legitimate in the general case.

Your syllabus can be "unit-n: overview of current layout technologies for www browsers". Problem solved, no?

This kind of vaguness must certainly be tolerated for established universities and other parts of the traditional pantheon in any given jurisdiction. But, depending on jurisdiction, new schools and small schools might well be given no such wiggle room.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com