The Living Syllabus

Veneering &c. (1826). A technical study in structural geometry and projection. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library.

Premise

This project explores the domain of Scholarly Markdown and what Bruzelius and Jacobs call The Living Syllabus—a methodology for creating sustainable, accessible, and resilient academic documents.

We are resisting the black box of the Learning Management System (LMS). By distinguishing the act of authorship (the source) from the proprietary environment of display (Canvas), we regain agency over our course materials.

The workflow is simple but radical:

Write in sustainable, plain-text Markdown or well-formatted Word documents (The Source).
Compile locally using Pandoc and Classless CSS themes.
Publish resilient, semantic HTML fragments into the "Walled Garden" of Canvas.

This turns the syllabus into a Quine-like system—a self-replicating text that preserves its own source while projecting a functional interface into the LMS.

View the full project repository on GitHub.

⚡ The Litmus Test

Before you install any tools, verify that your specific university instance of Canvas supports the Modern Web features we rely on.

Instructions:

Create a blank Page in Canvas.
Switch the editor to HTML View (</> icon).
Paste the code block below.
Save and Publish.

Paste this code into the HTML Editor (</>) of a blank Canvas Page to verify your system's constraints.

<div style="border: 2px solid #3182ce; padding: 20px; border-radius: 4px; font-family: sans-serif;">
  
  <div style="display: flex; gap: 10px; flex-wrap: wrap; margin-bottom: 20px;">
    <div style="flex: 1; min-width: 200px; background: #ebf8ff; padding: 10px; color: #1a202c;">
        <strong>Layout Engine:</strong> <span style="color: green;">Active</span>
        <br><small>If side-by-side on desktop, Flexbox works.</small>
    </div>
    <div style="flex: 1; min-width: 200px; background: #ebf8ff; padding: 10px; color: #1a202c;">
        <strong>Responsive Wrap:</strong> <span style="color: green;">Active</span>
        <br><small>If stacked on mobile, Flex-Wrap works.</small>
    </div>
  </div>

  <details style="cursor: pointer; background: #f7fafc; padding: 10px; border: 1px solid #cbd5e0; color: #1a202c;">
    <summary style="font-weight: bold;">▶ Click to Test Interactivity</summary>
    <div style="margin-top: 10px; color: #2c5282;">
      <em>Success:</em> The Canvas Sanitizer allows the <details> tag.
    </div>
  </details>

</div>

✅ COPIED

If the boxes align and the dropdown works: You are ready to use the "Syllabus as Code" workflow.
If the code is stripped: Your institution has aggressive sanitization settings.

📚 The Field Guide (Table of Contents)

I. The Narrative (Theory & Motivation)

Essays on why we must stop fighting the text editor and start engineering our pedagogy.

[Post] The Evil Quine: Why Microsoft Word is an "infected" compiler and how separating content from presentation saves your syllabus from bit rot.
[Coming Soon] Seizing the Interface: Using forensic HTML to teach students about the materiality of the internet. This post critiques the "Interface Effect" of the LMS and argues that seizing the interface through code is a necessary pedagogical act to restore student agency.
[Coming Soon] A Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) Syllabus: Exploring the philosophy of Maintenance and Modularity through the lens of Systems Theory. This post addresses the problem of Versioning Hell and argues for a single source of truth to combat the entropy of course materials over time.

II. The Documentation (Manuals & Tools)

Practical guides for the "Maintainer" workflow.

[Page] The Setup Guide: Installing VS Code, Pandoc, and the generate.js script. This includes the CSS Flattening patch for handling modern design variables.
[Coming Soon] The Component Gallery: A visual catalog of safe HTML widgets (Grading Tables, Hero Headers, Callout Boxes) that survive the LMS sanitizer.
[Page] Component Design With Blueprints: How to use LLMs as Co-Intelligence partners to generate atomic Tailwind components without writing code yourself.
[Page] The Theme Builder: A tool to help make your own classless .css theme files.
[Page] Troubleshooting & Constraints: A reference list of allowed HTML tags and fixes for common display issues (e.g., Dark Mode conflicts).

⚠️ The Trust Root Disclaimer

A Note on Institutional Shadow IT

This workflow operates on a principle of Root Trust. You are generating code locally and pasting it into a system (Canvas) you do not control.

You are the Compiler: Canvas is a hostile environment. It aggressively strips code it deems insecure. The tools provided here are designed to negotiate these restrictions using valid, semantic HTML5.
Maintain Your Source: Never edit the HTML inside Canvas directly. Your syllabus.md file is the Single Source of Truth. If you lose that file, you cannot easily reconstruct the clean source from the "compiled" HTML in Canvas.
Accessibility First: Do not use this tool to bypass accessibility standards. All components are designed to enforce high contrast and semantic structure for screen readers.