The syllabus

Including a link to the course syllabus from Topic 0 is almost obvious. We suggest two refinements to your syllabus.

Printer-friendly for letter and A4 sizes

First, make the syllabus printer-friendly. Even though we live in the computer age, many people still prefer to have a hardcopy of their schedules and tasks. Providing the syllabus in PDF format makes it easier for students to generate a printout.

If you have students in both North America and the rest of the world, you will want the printout to be formatted so that it prints well on both Letter and A4-sized paper. Letter-sized paper is shorter than A4, at 11 inches (279.4 mm). A4-sized paper is narrower than Letter, at 8.27 inches (210 mm). Ensure that content doesn't go outside the printable area of the paper, by using margins of 0.5 inches to keep the material inside that area. This will take care of the top, left, and right margins for students who are using both A4 and Letter paper.

As A4 is 0.7 inches (18 mm) longer than...