Commercial Solutions

While the commercial solutions below are course related, many of them exceed the area of better managing syllabi and enter the arena of learning management system. However, the examples below showcase the need for better syllabus management and course content tools.

• Canvas by Instructure

  Created as an alternative LMS, Canvas sports a clean interface and open source access. It also includes an impressive set of features including multimedia and web conferencing.

• Concourse by Intellidemia

  The self-proclaimed “Syllabus Geeks” at Intellidemia developed a syllabus platform that is more than an instructor authoring tool. Concourse streamlines administrative assessment, accreditation, and workflow processes by getting syllabi in one place online. With anytime, anywhere access to syllabi, students can sync their course syllabus to their personal online calendars and instructors can send automatic email notifications every time they update their syllabus.

• CourseSites by Blackboard

  A free, hosted online course creation and facilitation service that empowers individual K‑12 teachers, college and university instructors and community educators to add a web‑based component to their courses, or even host an entire course on the Internet. You even choose your own URL, so students can find your page easily.

• CourseKit

  Some of you may have heard of the UPenn trio that just got fed up with Blackboard and started their own “lively,” course community. CourseKit started out as a student sourced course management tool built around the syllabus that grew into a full‑blown LMS alternative.

• OpenSyllabus by Sakai

  Sakai has created open software to enhance teaching and learning through community-based development. The OpenSyllabus project simplifies syllabus creation and management for instructors and administrators through templates, resource uploading, and a centralized storage location.

• ŸSyllabontes

  Still in it the beta phase, Syllabontes has reinvented the syllabus. It creates a one-stop suite of applications for everyone from students to faculty, built right into the core element of a course—the syllabus. Oh, and every time an instructor publishes a syllabus in their tool, Syllabontes plant a tree.

• thisCourse

  Instructors can have a free full‑featured course website up and running in just a few minutes. In addition to the information on your syllabus, thisCourse provides a fast place to put documents for students to read, a space for student discussions, and many other useful features.