The Open Syllabus Project (OSP)
The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) collects and analyzes millions of
syllabi to support educational research and novel teaching and learning
applications. The OSP helps instructors develop classes, libraries
manage collections, and presses develop books. It supports students and
lifelong learners in their exploration of topics and fields. It
creates incentives for faculty to improve teaching materials and to use
open licenses. It supports work on aligning higher education with job
market needs and on making student mobility easier. It also challenges
faculty and universities to work together to steward this important data
resource.
The OSP currently has a corpus of seven million
English-language syllabi from over 80 countries. It uses machine
learning and other techniques to extract citations, dates, fields, and
other metadata from these documents. The resulting data is made freely
available via the Syllabus Explorer and in bulk for academic research.
The
OSP is based The American Assembly—an independent non-profit organization
affiliated with Columbia University.
[
Classics and
Hebrew each have a fair number of syllabi in The Open Syllabus Project]
Short answer:
Please consider contributing your syllabi to the OSP collection. If
you’re willing to do so, send them attached to an email to:
syllabusopen@gmail.com.
All
shared syllabi are ‘private’ by default—they will not be available for
display or download. But we are also building a public collection that
we will make available for download. If you are willing to share on this
basis, please put ‘public’ in the email subject line.
Longer answer:
We want the Open Syllabus Project to become a way to understand higher
education as a global project of transmitting knowledge from one
generation to the next. We also want it to become a tool for
democratizing and defending the integrity of that project.
We need help to realize those goals.
We
need the support and participation of universities—especially in the
form of access to university-held syllabus archives. If you are in a
position to explore formal participation of your university in the
project, send us a note.
We need the support of faculty. Syllabus donations are always welcome via
syllabusopen@gmail.com.
We
welcome older syllabi. The collection is small before 2010 and
inadequate for any real analysis before 2000. We would love to be able
to expand the historical reach of the Explorer.
We are also trying
to expand further beyond US and anglophone schools to make the OSP a
framework for curricular comparison and educational research around the
world. We will increase the linguistic coverage of the project in
2020. For countries where the display of curricular choices can put
faculty at risk, the OSP will continue to serve as a dark archive that
curates–but does not display–curricular history.
Finally, the OSP
is an argument for a more open curricular culture. By showing what’s
possible when curricular materials are aggregrated, we hope the OSP can
contribute to building it.
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