HARVEST KERNEL / FREE WORKING SESSION
The First Screen Rewrite
Thirty minutes, by hand, on one real syllabus. You rewrite only what a student sees before the first scroll. You finish holding a finished first screen you can paste into your live syllabus today.
How to use this. Open one syllabus you are about to submit. Only one. Work top to bottom and type into every box. Nothing is saved to a server, so use Copy Everything at the end and paste the result into your syllabus file before you close the tab.
PHASE 1 / SEED
Find where the reading stopped
You cannot fix a first screen you have never actually looked at. So look at it the way a student does, on a phone, for eight seconds, before deciding whether any of this is worth the scroll.
PHASE 2 / SPROUT
Answer the three questions that belong above the fold
A first screen has room for three answers and no more. Not policy. Not the grading table. These three, in this order, written the way you would say them out loud to a student standing in your doorway.
PHASE 3 / GROW
Assemble it, then cut it until it fits
Everything you just wrote goes above the first scroll, in that order, and everything that was there before moves down. Nothing is deleted from your syllabus. It is reordered, which is why this survives a department template review.
PHASE 4 / HARVEST
Put it in the live file, then look at what is still owed
A rewrite that lives in a browser tab is a nice afternoon. A rewrite pasted into the file you submit is a course that starts differently.
That is one section. Look at what it cost: about thirty minutes, and almost all of it went into questions five, eleven and thirteen, the three that carry your actual thinking about this course.
Now count the other sections you teach this term. Every one of them needs its own first screen, because the answer to question five is different in each of them or the course did not need to exist separately.
Then count what you did not touch today. The outcomes alignment you skipped again. The accessibility statement in question thirteen, which is not going away: on April 20, 2026 the Department of Justice extended the ADA Title II web accessibility compliance dates rather than removing them, moving public entities serving 50,000 or more people to April 26, 2027 and smaller public entities and special district governments to April 26, 2028, against WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Your syllabus is web content. The deadline moved. It did not disappear.
The manual version works. It just does not survive four sections and a template review.
The Syllabus Generator in the Harvest Kernel Faculty Toolkit runs this same pass on every section you teach, writes the accessibility and outcomes sections in plain language rather than boilerplate, ships in 19 languages, and keeps your answers to questions five and eleven as a Course Record so next August starts from your own reasoning instead of last fall’s file with the dates changed.
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