Designing a Syllabus

A syllabus is probably going to be a student's first impression of the class in terms of what is going to happen and what is expected of each student. Therefore, its important that you have everything you need to say down on that document so that you draw in the appropriate students for your course and even allow students the ability to plan how they would like to tackle the course material.
Given my experience in entomology along with my inexperience in course design, I stuck with something I was familiar with and interested in teaching others about. I chose a course dissecting insects' role in our society, along with common misconceptions, fact about insect life-cycles and physiology, and other general perceptions people may have about insects.

 This course is meant to be an entry-level course that grabs the attention of new scholars who are interested in insects, but never had the opportunity to study them and aren't comfortable taking the typical intro course.

Unfortunately for myself, I wasn't able to attend the class where we exchanged syllabi. However, I had a vast resource pool that I was able to dip into: my previous courses. I looked at each of my courses I enjoyed the most, looked at their syllabi, and wrote down all the important policies, tidbits of information, and scheduling that I felt like were very useful for me to have and important in outlining the course's expectations.

The 'deep-dive' showed that both Xiyu and myself had a pretty good idea about what we thought would be important to include on our syllabus and what we wanted to teach a course on. With a few minor points here and there for us to fix, and a schedule added to my own syllabus, we both seemed to have very strong syllabi that I would love to have for any course I'd take.