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Official descriptions of courses at UNC System schools became public records this year in a controversial policy change that rocked North Carolina academia. The policy also requires schools to make these course syllabi easily and publicly searchable online.
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Now, in an effort to comply, UNC-Chapel Hill has struck a deal with Simple Higher Ed, a software company that offers a centralized repository called Simple Syllabus.
Many syllabi are already live in the database.
UNC-Chapel Hill pays $50,000 per year for the company’s services, according to documents the university provided in response to a public records request by The News & Observer. That’s based on full-time student enrollment of 30,607. The contract, signed by UNC on May 1, also includes a one-time $7,500 implementation fee.
The contract includes 10 gigabytes of storage per month. If UNC should max that out, additional storage costs $1 per gigabyte per month. The contract auto-renews annually.
The system policy allows each university to determine its own procedure for complying with the policy. NC State University, for example, uses a class and syllabi search tool the university built in-house.
Simple Syllabus provides all sorts of functionality for UNC-Chapel Hill beyond the searchable syllabus library.
The software includes a control panel and data hub for administrators, a dashboard and syllabus editing service for faculty, and a student-facing portal.
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Administrators can generate and export reports for accreditation and regulatory purposes, according to the contract. It also allows faculty to set certain components of the syllabus to private to protect intellectual property. Keyword and filtered search allows “introspection on all campus syllabi to locate highly specific results,” the contract reads, and users can subscribe to be notified of changes to certain syllabi.
For students, Simple Syllabus organizes the syllabi for their current courses, and keeps an archive of syllabi from completed ones. It can also provide an aggregated list of all the textbooks they need for that semester.
Under the new policy, a compliant syllabus must include the following five elements:
Many of the syllabi currently available on the database stick to these requirements, forgoing the week-by-week breakdowns that are typical of syllabi.
UNC-Chapel Hill said on its website that the searchable repository “is intended to increase transparency, provide clearer expectations for students, and support academic planning and success. It does not affect faculty authority over course content, pedagogy or instructional design.”
“For public universities like ours, I’m convinced that more transparency is the right response to greater scrutiny,” UNC System president Peter Hans wrote in an op-ed about the policy change in The N&O last year.
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This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 10:02 AM.