Type of business | 501(c)(3) corporation [1] |
---|---|
Type of site | Digital database |
Available in | English |
Headquarters | New York City, U.S. [1] |
Country of origin | United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
Owner | Open Syllabus Inc. [1] |
President | Joe Karaganis |
Managing director | Joe Karaganis |
Key people | |
Industry | Educational research |
Revenue | $1,942,525 (2020) [1] |
Total assets | $1,579,393 (2020) [1] |
Employees | 5 (2020) [1] |
URL | opensyllabus |
Commercial | No |
Registration | None |
Launched | January 2016 |
Current status | Active |
OCLC number | 973953893 |
According to their 2020 Form 990. [1] |
The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) is an online open-source platform that catalogs and analyzes millions of college syllabi. [3] Founded by researchers from the American Assembly at Columbia University, the OSP has amassed the most extensive collection of searchable syllabi. Since its beta launch in 2016, the OSP has collected over 7 million course syllabi from over 80 countries, primarily by scraping publicly accessible university websites. The project is directed by Joe Karaganis.
The OSP was formed by a group of data scientists, sociologists, and digital-humanities researchers at the American Assembly, a public-policy institute based at Columbia University. The OSP was partly funded by the Sloan Foundation and the Arcadia Fund. [4] Joe Karaganis, former vice-president of the American Assembly, serves as the project director of the OSP. [5] The project builds on prior attempts to archive syllabi, such as H-Net, MIT OpenCourseWare, and historian Dan Cohen's defunct Syllabus Finder website (Cohen now sits on the OSP's advisory board). [6] The OSP became a non-profit and independent of the American Assembly in November 2019. [7]
In January 2016, the OSP launched a beta version of their "Syllabus Explorer," which they had collected data for since 2013. The Syllabus Explorer allows users to browse and search texts from over one million college course syllabi. [8] The OSP launched a more comprehensive version 2.0 of the Syllabus Explorer in July 2019. The newer version includes an interactive visualization that displays texts as dots on a knowledge map. [9] [10] As of 2022 [update] , the OSP has collected over 7 million course syllabi. [11] The Syllabus Explorer represents the "largest collection of searchable syllabi ever amassed." [12]
The OSP has collected syllabi data from over 80 countries [13] dating to 2000. [4] The syllabi stem from over 4,000 worldwide institutions. [14] Most of the OSP's data originates from the United States. Canada, Australia, and the U.K also have large datasets. [10]
The OSP primarily collects syllabi by scraping publicly accessible university websites. [12] The OSP also allows syllabi submissions from faculty, students, and administrators. [15] The OSP developers use machine learning and natural language processing to extract metadata from such syllabi. [16] Since only metadata is collected, no individual syllabus or personal identifying information is found in the OSP database. [17] The OSP classifies the syllabi into 62 subject fields—corresponding to the U.S. Department of Education's Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP). [12] Additionally, the OSP assigns each text a "teaching score" from 0–100. This score represents the text's percentile rank among citations in the total citation count and is a numerical indicator of the relative frequency of which a particular work is taught. [18] The OSP also has data on which texts are most likely to be assigned together. [19]
The developers behind the OSP admit that the database is incomplete and likely contains "a fair number of errors." [20] Karaganis estimates that 80–100 million syllabi exist in the United States alone. The OSP is unable to access syllabi behind private course-management software like Blackboard. [4]
Using data from the OSP, anthropologist Laurence Ralph uncovered that black anthropologists are "woefully under-represented in (if not erased from) most anthropology syllabi." [21] Black authors wrote less than 1 percent of the top 1,000 assigned works. [22]
The database indicates Greg Mankiw is the most frequently cited author for college economics courses. [23]
The OSP found that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was the most widely taught novel in college courses. [24] [25] [26] Additionally, the majority of novels published after 1945 taught in English classes were historical fiction. [27]
The most read female writer on college campuses is Kate L. Turabian for her A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations . [28] [29] Turabian is followed by Diana Hacker, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf. [30] [31]
The most assigned film according to the OSP is the 1929 Soviet documentary film, Man with a Movie Camera. English filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock is the most assigned director in college courses. [32]
Historians George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi's America: A Narrative History is the number one assigned textbook for history, followed by Anne Moody's memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi . [33]
The most assigned texts in the field of philosophy include Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism , and Plato's Republic . [34] [35] Plato's Republic was also the second most assigned text in universities in the English-speaking world (only behind Strunk and White's Elements of Style ). [34]
David Halliday's et al. Fundamentals of Physics is the number one ranked physics textbook in the OSP's database. [36]
Data from the OSP indicates that the dominant political science texts are written almost exclusively by white men and scholars based in the West. [37] In the top 200 most-frequently assigned works, 15 are authored by at least one woman. [38]
American president Woodrow Wilson's article "The Study of Administration" was the most frequently assigned text in public affairs and administration syllabi. [39]
According to William Germano et al., the OSP is a "fascinating resource but is also prone to misrepresenting or at least distracting us from the most important business of a syllabus: communicating with students." [40]
Historian William Caferro remarks that the OSP is a "tacit experience of sharing, but a useful one." [41]
English professor Bart Beaty writes that, "Despite the many reservations about the completeness of its data, the OSP provides a rare opportunity for scholars to move beyond the anecdotal in discussions of canon-formation in teaching." [42]
Media theorist Elizabeth Losh opines that "big data approaches", like the OSP, may "raise troubling questions for instructors about informed consent, pedagogical privacy, and quantified metrics." [43]
Pedagogy, from Ancient Greek παιδαγωγία (paidagōgía), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political, and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as an academic discipline, is the study of how knowledge and skills are imparted in an educational context, and it considers the interactions that take place during learning. Both the theory and practice of pedagogy vary greatly as they reflect different social, political, and cultural contexts.
Robert David Putnam is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. Putnam developed the influential two-level game theory that assumes international agreements will only be successfully brokered if they also result in domestic benefits. His most famous work, Bowling Alone, argues that the United States has undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life since the 1960s, with serious negative consequences. In March 2015, he published a book called Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis that looked at issues of inequality of opportunity in the United States. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Putnam is the fourth most frequently cited author on college syllabi for political science courses.
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. His influential work Pedagogy of the Oppressed is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement, and was the third most cited book in the social sciences as of 2016 according to Google Scholar.
Robert Jervis was an American political scientist who was the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. Jervis was co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, a series published by Cornell University Press.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
Kate Ledgerwood Turabian was an Armenian-American, by marriage, educator who is best known for her book A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. In 2018, the University of Chicago Press published the 9th edition of the book. The University of Chicago Press estimates that the various editions of this book have sold more than 9 million copies since its publication in 1937. A 2016 analysis of over one million college course syllabi found that Turabian was the most commonly assigned female author due to this book.
A learning management system (LMS) is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and delivery of educational courses, training programs, materials or learning and development programs. The learning management system concept emerged directly from e-Learning. Learning management systems make up the largest segment of the learning system market. The first introduction of the LMS was in the late 1990s. Learning management systems have faced a massive growth in usage due to the emphasis on remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A syllabus or specification is a document that communicates information about an academic course or class and defines expectations and responsibilities. It is generally an overview or summary of the curriculum. A syllabus may be set out by an examination board or prepared by the tutor or instructor who teaches or controls the course. The word is also used more generally for an abstract or programme of knowledge, and is best known in this sense as referring to two catalogues published by the Catholic Church in 1864 and 1907 condemning certain doctrinal positions.
Hal Ronald Varian is Chief Economist at Google and holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information. Varian is an economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics.
Digital rhetoric can be generally defined as communication that exists in the digital sphere. As such, digital rhetoric can be expressed in many different forms, including text, images, videos, and software. Due to the increasingly mediated nature of our contemporary society, there are no longer clear distinctions between digital and non-digital environments. This has expanded the scope of digital rhetoric to account for the increased fluidity with which humans interact with technology.
David Guy Myers is a professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan, United States, and the author of 17 books, including popular textbooks entitled Psychology, Exploring Psychology, Social Psychology and general-audience books dealing with issues related to Christian faith as well as scientific psychology. In addition, he has published chapters in over 60 books and numerous scholarly research articles in professional journals. Myers is widely recognized for his research on happiness and is one of the supporters of the positive psychological movement.
Computer science education or computing education is the field of teaching and learning the discipline of computer science, and computational thinking. The field of computer science education encompasses a wide range of topics, from basic programming skills to advanced algorithm design and data analysis. It is a rapidly growing field that is essential to preparing students for careers in the technology industry and other fields that require computational skills.
The lexical approach is a method of teaching foreign languages described by Michael Lewis in the early 1990s. The basic concept on which this approach rests is the idea that an important part of learning a language consists of being able to understand and produce lexical phrases as chunks. Students are taught to be able to perceive patterns of language (grammar) as well as have meaningful set uses of words at their disposal when they are taught in this way. In 2000, Norbert Schmitt, an American linguist and a Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, contributed to a learning theory supporting the lexical approach he stated that "the mind stores and processes these [lexical] chunks as individual wholes." The short-term capacity of the brain is much more limited than long-term and so it is much more efficient for our brain to pull up a lexical chunk as if it were one piece of information as opposed to pulling up each word as separate pieces of information.
Library Genesis (LibGen) is a file-sharing based shadow library website for scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. The site enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere. LibGen describes itself as a "links aggregator", providing a searchable database of items "collected from publicly available public Internet resources" as well as files uploaded "from users".
Online learning involves courses offered by primary institutions that are 100% virtual. Online learning, or virtual classes offered over the internet, is contrasted with traditional courses taken in a brick-and-mortar school building. It is a development in distance education that expanded in the 1990s with the spread of the commercial Internet and the World Wide Web. The learner experience is typically asynchronous but may also incorporate synchronous elements. The vast majority of institutions utilize a learning management system for the administration of online courses. As theories of distance education evolve, digital technologies to support learning and pedagogy continue to transform as well.
Digital pedagogy is the study and use of contemporary digital technologies in teaching and learning. Digital pedagogy may be applied to online, hybrid, and face-to-face learning environments. Digital pedagogy also has roots in the theory of constructivism.
Jeffry Alan Frieden is the Stanfield Professor of International Peace at Harvard University and chair of Harvard University's Department of Government. According to the Open Syllabus Project, he is one of the most cited authors on college syllabi for political science courses.
Jill Walker Rettberg is co-director of the Center for Digital Narrative and Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. She is "a leading researcher in self-representation in social media" and a European Research Council grantee (2018–2023) with the project Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media. Rettberg is known for innovative research dissemination in social media, having started her research blog jill/txt in 2000, and developed Snapchat Research Stories in 2017.
The Media History Digital Library (MHDL) is a non-profit, open access digital archive founded by David Pierce and directed by Eric Hoyt that compiles books, magazines, and other print materials related to the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound and makes these materials accessible online for free. The MHDL both digitizes physical materials and acquires digital copies from outside libraries, archives, collectors, and other collaborators. Most of the material in its more than 2.5 million pages is in the public domain and therefore free for all to use with no restrictions.
Diana Hacker was an American writer and educator who authored several prominent writing manuals. Her guide, A Writer's Reference, co-written with Nancy Sommers, became the number one best-selling college textbook in the United States. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Hacker is the most assigned female author on college campuses.