Extend the Learning Arena Beyond the Spatial and Temporal Boundaries of the Traditional Classroom:  Syllawebs often incorporate guides to synchronous and asynchronous discussion tools (e.g. chat spaces or threaded message boards),  interactive assignments with links to suggestions for further reading and research, and links to reference tools like dictionaries, thesauruses, or citation and documentation guidelines.  Discussion tools make it possible for students to interact with both the teacher and each other throughout the quarter, not only when class is in session.   Further, many have noted that students who are reluctant to ask questions or contribute to discussions in class find it easier to forge mutually satisfying connections with their teachers and peers online.   Links to readings and references bring the concepts and skills of a course to life for students so that they can, for instance, open a link in one window even as they apply its ideas or guidelines to an assignment they are working on in another. Taken together, all of these features empower students to act both more independently and more collaboratively.

Make a Wider Variety of Resources Immediately Available:  None of us can be expert at everything, and no one is available all of the time.  Syllawebs offer both students and teachers access to other experts and their materials. For instance, rather than fielding every inquiry about internet hoaxes and viruses, I would probably direct students to The San Fernando Valley Folklore Society's Urban Legends Reference Pages to investigate the veracity of currently circulating rumors for themselves.  Similarly, if a student struggling with sentence fragments asked for a guide or a worksheet to help in understanding and eliminating the problem, I'd likely direct her to some of the materials available at Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL). Of course, syllawebs also offer us the opportunity to highlight resources available to students right here at College of DuPage, including The Skills Development Center,  The Writing Center, and The Library.  As Communications teachers, we often do develop close relationships with our students, introducing them not only to college-level academic reading and writing, but also, in a sense, to the overall college experience.  A thoughtfully designed syllaweb can become another means of helping our students develop the ability successfully to negotiate all of their new opportunities and responsibilities.

Emphasize the Logic of a Course's Sequence of Assignments, as Well as the Logic of a Sequence of Courses:  Teachers sometimes despair that students seem to forget recently hard won skills and knowledge as they undertake each new assignment.  Students, the complaint goes, approach each activity as a discrete unit, failing to connect the units to one another, or to recognize that they are interconnected for a reason.  A well-designed syllaweb won't automatically solve this problem, but it does offer a means of addressing it directly.  For instance, an assignment calling for critical synthesis might deliberately not only remind students of their previous work on critical reading and summary, but directly link them to an overview of the key skills and concepts that earlier work entailed.  When teachers publish more that one syllaweb, develop a comprehensive syllaweb encompassing all of their courses, or simply link to each other's sites, they can similarly highlight the relationships among courses in a sequence, emphasizing how 102 flows from 101, and how 103 builds on skills developed in 102.