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Inherited Course Audit and Rebuild Plan
What the course actually covers, what it assesses, and which stated outcomes nothing measures, before you teach the first session.
River reads the course you were handed rather than asking you to describe it. The syllabus goes in, along with the slide decks, the assignments and whatever export came out of last term. What comes back is an account of what the course covers now. A register carries one row per artifact, naming the outcome it serves and where it disagrees with the syllabus. Alongside it sits the list of stated outcomes that nothing in the package assesses.
The best page written on this ranks first for good reason, and it stops one step short. Rebecca Barrett-Fox writes that unless you have opened every assignment, reviewed every exam question and scoured the discussion prompts, you should not stray from what your predecessor intended. She is right on both counts. That reading is the whole job, and it arrives in the week before term alongside everything else you already have to do. The advice describes the work accurately and then leaves you to it.
Built for the instructor handed a section days before it starts, the adjunct teaching a course somebody else designed, and the coordinator keeping several sections consistent with each other. Most of what ranks here tells you to review the materials and check that the assessments match the stated outcomes, which is the right instruction and the entire difficulty. If what you took over is a repository rather than a syllabus, the codebase version of this fits better. When two documents in the folder state different things, reconciling them comes first.
The package carries the parts and not the joins
A course export is an interchange format, and an interchange format represents some things and not others. 1EdTech's Common Cartridge specification is blunt about which. Questions within a question bank cannot be referenced by any assessment in the same cartridge. An assessment is one flat section holding its own copies of whatever it delivers. The package can carry the bank. It can carry the exams. It has nowhere to record that this exam drew from that bank.
The same document does something sharper with the word rubric. It lists Question Rubrics among a question's parts. It then prohibits that element on the object it defines as a question, and describes the field which does survive as one supplying instructions rather than criteria. An instructor who checks the specification reads a homonym and concludes the grading rubrics came through. What actually survived depends on the container. Blackboard's own export does include rubrics associated to assignments, so this is a fact about the format rather than a fact about your course.
Which leaves the question of what governs when an artifact and the syllabus disagree. Accreditors answer it without mentioning a syllabus at all. NECHE requires an institution offering multiple sections of one course to ensure consistency in learning outcomes across them. Outcomes are the part you inherited. Delivery is the part you choose. That line decides every row in the register, and it is why the verdict column reads agreement with the stated outcome rather than which file was saved most recently.
How it works
Paste the syllabus
Add the list of materials and the export if there is one, plus whatever you already know about the course.
Read the package
River opens every artifact, reads the manifest, and works out what each item is there to teach.
Rebuild the joins
Each artifact is matched to the outcome it serves and to whatever assessment actually tests that outcome.
Decide what changes
Outcomes are fixed by the department and delivery is yours. The register keeps the two apart.
What you get
- One row per artifact: the outcome it serves, what assesses that outcome, and what disagrees
- Every stated outcome that nothing in the package assesses, named before you teach a session
- Bank questions already used in a delivered exam, separated from the ones still unused
- Where an artifact contradicts the syllabus, with both sides quoted so the conflict is visible
- The gradable items the export carries, and the dates it does not, marked absent
- A reading order, so the artifacts that settle the most questions get opened first
Common questions
Four files have syllabus in the name. Which one is current?
The filename cannot settle it and the folder date cannot either, because copying a folder to a shared drive rewrites every date at once. Queen's University's naming standard asks that a name let you identify a document without opening it. Yours were not named that way, so the run reads the contents. A library holding four near-copies of one item is the same problem.
I was handed a PDF of the syllabus and nothing else. Is that enough?
It gives you the contract and none of the evidence. You get the stated outcomes, the assessment weights and the schedule as written, with every row about coverage left open. The gap list becomes questions for the coordinator. An export, or last term's live shell, turns those open rows into findings. Where the syllabus itself needs rebuilding, the course design template computes the outcome-to-assessment join forward.
Did my predecessor's grading rubrics survive the export?
That depends on the container, and the specification is easy to misread. Common Cartridge lists Question Rubrics among a question's parts, then defines the field that survives as one carrying instructions rather than criteria. Blackboard's own package does include rubrics attached to assignments. The run reports what is present in what you were given, not what the format permits.
Can it tell me when things are due?
Not from a cartridge. That format carries whether late submission is allowed, the attempt limit and the time limit, and it does not carry the date a thing is due. The run lists every gradable item, marks the dates absent, and names where they have to come from: the syllabus, last term's live shell, or the department's copy of record. Inventing one would be the worst available failure.
The slides cover things the syllabus never mentions. What now?
Record it, and keep teaching to the outcomes. An accreditor requires consistency in learning outcomes across sections of one course, which makes outcomes the part you inherited and delivery the part you choose. Extra coverage is not automatically a problem. Coverage that has quietly replaced a stated outcome is, and a definition of record settles the same argument elsewhere.
Does it tell me how to teach the course?
No. A slide deck records what was shown, not what was said over it. The teaching does not travel with the files, and this makes no attempt to recover it. Recovering it means recording the person, which is a separate job with its own gaps. What the materials can settle is coverage, assessment structure and where an artifact conflicts with a stated outcome.
Inherited Course Audit and Rebuild Plan
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