# A course syllabus and course book — one source for the syllabus, the weekly readings and next term Recipe No. 15, Teaching and courses. From The know.sh Cookbook: https://know.sh/cookbook/syllabus - For: a sociology professor who teaches Introduction to Sociology every autumn and spring - You bring: last term’s syllabus, the course objectives as the department approved them, this term’s required institutional statements, and the reading list with page numbers - You get: a public syllabus with sixteen weekly pages of readings, objectives and discussion prompts, checked so that every objective is assessed, and ready to roll into next term - Time: an afternoon the first term, then an hour before each term after - Keep it: private while you work; share one document by a read-only link Every term the syllabus gets written twice: once as the file the department keeps, and again, week by week, in the learning management system. Between the two sit the things neither holds — why this reading and not that one, which discussion prompt fell flat, which objective nothing actually tests. By week nine the two copies disagree about the late-work policy, and next term starts from whichever file you find first. This recipe keeps one source for SOC 101. Your assistant, whichever one you use, turns last term's syllabus into a document: the front matter in the overview, and each week a numbered finding with its readings, the objectives it serves and three discussion prompts. You fix it up in the editor, and then the assistant reads the whole course and reports any objective that no assessment grades. Students get one read-only link, and next term you edit the same document, because its revisions keep the old one. The LMS stays the system of record for grades, submissions and the due dates that count. know.sh holds the course as you designed it, and it never sees a student's name or score. ## What you will use - **Shelf**: One shelf per course, *SOC 101 Introduction to Sociology*, for the syllabus and anything you write around it. - **Research document**: One document, *SOC 101 syllabus and course book*; its overview is the syllabus front matter. - **Finding**: One finding per week, filed as an *Observation*; the midterm and the paper weeks marked **Key**. - **Your AI assistant**: Builds the course book from last term’s syllabus, maps objectives to assessments, drafts prompts for you to rewrite, and rolls the dates forward. - **The editor**: Where you paste the required statements word for word and make each week read the way you teach it. - **Margin notes**: Your notes to next term’s self, beside the reading they are about. Students never see them. - **Revisions**: Last term’s syllabus, kept without a copy, each change marked as yours or the assistant’s; **Restore** brings any week back. - **Public link**: One read-only link for students, posted in the LMS and replaced at the start of each term. ## Method ### 1. Gather the front matter before you start Gather four things: last term's syllabus, the learning objectives as the department approved them, the grading scheme exactly as it stands in the LMS, and this term's required statements from your institution's syllabus template — accessibility and disability services, academic integrity, Title IX, and whatever else your campus asks for. Keep the required statements to one side. They change between terms, they are not yours to paraphrase, and they should not pass through an assistant for tidying. You will paste them in yourself, word for word. ### 2. Have your assistant build the course book Give your assistant last term's syllabus: attach the file in Claude or ChatGPT, or point a local client at it. Ask it to make a shelf, *SOC 101 Introduction to Sociology*, and a document on it, *SOC 101 syllabus and course book*. The overview takes the front matter under plain headings: *Course description*, *Learning objectives* (numbered LO1 to LO5), *Grading*, *Policies*, *Use of AI in this course*. Then one finding per week, from *Week 1 — What is sociology?* to *Week 16 — Final exam*, each with the same four parts: - **Readings**, with chapter and page numbers and a link to the library's e-reserve page. - **Objectives**: which of LO1 to LO5 the week serves. - **Discussion prompts**: three questions for Thursday's seminar. - **Due this week**, as the LMS has it. Sixteen findings arrive in a few minutes. Every one is a draft to check. ### 3. Fix it up in the editor Open the document and press **Edit**. Paste the required statements into the overview under their own heading, word for word from the template. Then read week by week: correct page numbers, check every due date against the LMS, mark the midterm and paper weeks **Key**, and change anything still undecided to a *Question*. Drag a week into a new place if the schedule moved. Open each week with a sentence naming its thinkers: "This week we read Cooley and Mead on the self." The index learns single names that recur in finding titles and first lines, so *Durkheim*, *Goffman* and *Mills* each lead to the weeks that read them. Concepts such as anomie never become index terms; find them with **Look up** (⌘K), which searches every word. ### 4. Ask your assistant whether every objective is assessed Ask your assistant to read *SOC 101 syllabus and course book* and map each learning objective to the weeks that teach it and the assessments that grade it, quoting the lines that show it. Have it file the result as a new finding, *Objectives and assessments*, with a table, so you can read it beside the weeks rather than in a chat. Treat it as a checklist, not a verdict. The assistant sees only what you wrote: if the midterm does test LO3 but the syllabus never says so, it will call LO3 unassessed. Either way you learn something. Fix the gap in the course or the gap in the description, and keep the finding, out of the students' link, for the next time the department asks about alignment. ### 5. Draft discussion prompts, then make them yours Discussion prompts go stale faster than anything else in a syllabus. Ask your assistant for five candidate prompts on a week, tied to something a first-year student sees on campus, written in a margin note on that week rather than in its text. Keep one, rewrite another, discard the rest. Unless you have given it the chapter, the assistant works from your summaries and page references. Check every prompt against the reading before you use it. A prompt about a claim the author never made costs ten minutes of a seminar. ### 6. Share one link and post it in the LMS When the syllabus reads well, press **Share**, leave it with no expiry (the default), and copy the link the moment it appears: know.sh shows it once. From each finding's own page, leave out *Objectives and assessments* and anything still marked *Question*. Post the link on the course home page in the LMS and on the first-day slides. Students see the overview and the weeks, each with its type and importance, and none of your notes or highlights. They cannot write back through it; questions arrive by email or in office hours, as before. If the registrar wants a file, copy the text into the department's template once a term. The link is the version you keep correcting. ### 7. Roll it forward to next term At the end of term, read through the weeks and leave yourself notes beside the lines they are about: "The Durkheim excerpt ran long; use the shorter one", "Week 11, prompt 2 never worked". Notes are private, so they can be blunt. For the new term, give your assistant the new calendar and ask it to update every date in the same document; then paste the new required statements yourself and act on your notes. There is no need for a copy. Each week's revisions keep last term's wording, marked as yours or the assistant's, and **Restore** puts it back. Finally, open **Share** and replace the link, so last term's students are not reading next term's schedule. Replacing resets the expiry and the left-out findings, so set them again. ## Prompts to try Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, make a shelf called “SOC 101 Introduction to Sociology” and on it a document called “SOC 101 syllabus and course book” from the syllabus I have attached. Put the course description, learning objectives (numbered LO1 to LO5), grading, policies and AI policy in the overview, and leave a heading “Required statements” empty for me. Then add one finding per week, titled “Week N — theme”, with four parts: Readings (with page numbers), Objectives, Discussion prompts and Due this week. File every week as an Observation and change none of my wording beyond arranging it. Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, read the document “SOC 101 syllabus and course book” on my SOC 101 shelf. For each learning objective in the overview, list the weeks that teach it and the assessments that grade it, quoting the line that shows each. Flag objectives no assessment grades and assessments that serve no objective. File the result as a new finding called “Objectives and assessments”, as a table, and do not change any week. Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, open “SOC 101 syllabus and course book” on my SOC 101 shelf. The spring 2027 term starts on Tuesday 19 January; classes meet Tuesdays and Thursdays, and there is no class on 16 or 18 March. Update the dates under “Due this week” in every week to match, then list every week where a due date now falls on a day with no class, so I can decide what to do. ## Variations - Teaching an online section of the same course? Keep one document and add an *Online section* part to the weeks that differ, rather than keeping two syllabi that drift apart. - Preparing a new course from scratch? Claude Code, with the know.sh plugin, can set it out as a campaign, *SOC 240 preparation*, with steps for desk copies, e-reserve requests, objectives and an accessibility check of every reading, each step blocking the ones that depend on it. - Give students something to revise from: the [class study guide](/cookbook/class-study-guide) builds one document per unit, with practice questions, and each week can link to its unit. - When your weekly summaries start to read like chapters, the [open textbook](/cookbook/open-textbook) recipe shows how to draft them in the open under a Creative Commons licence. ## Where it falls short - There is no connection to your LMS. Grades, submissions and official due dates live there, and a date changed in one place has to be changed by hand in the other. - There is no export. If the registrar or the department needs a file, copy the text into their template. - Students read; they cannot comment or ask questions through the link. Those still come by email and in office hours. - Revisions are kept per document and per finding, not as named term versions. To see last spring’s week 6, open that week’s revisions and find the date. ## A note on student privacy and the wording that is not yours Keep student names, rosters, grades, accommodations and anything else from a student's record out of know.sh, and out of the assistant you connect to it, unless your institution has approved those tools for that use (FERPA). The syllabus describes the course; the LMS and the registrar hold the students. Paste your institution's required statements word for word from its current template, and do not ask an assistant to shorten or reword them. State your own policy on AI in the course plainly in the overview, where students will read it. Link to readings through your library's e-reserve or the publisher's page rather than pasting chapters into a public link. Assistants make mistakes: check every prompt, date and claim about alignment against the reading, the LMS and the assessment itself. Indexed under: Syllabus, Learning objectives, Course alignment, Required statements, Discussion prompts, Term roll-over, Learning management system.