Open Syllabus Project

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.

Open Syllabus Project
Screenshot
Homepage on 3 October 2022
Type of business501(c)(3) corporation[1]
Type of site
Digital database
Available inEnglish
HeadquartersNew York City, U.S.[1]
Country of originUnited States
Area servedWorldwide
OwnerOpen Syllabus Inc.[1]
PresidentJoe Karaganis
Managing directorJoe Karaganis
Key people
IndustryEducational research
RevenueIncrease $1,942,525 (2020)[1]
Total assetsIncrease $1,579,393 (2020)[1]
EmployeesIncrease 5 (2020)[1]
URLopensyllabus.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationNone
LaunchedJanuary 2016 (2016-01)
Current statusActive
OCLC number973953893
According to their 2020 Form 990.[1]

History

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, the OSP has collected over 7 million course syllabi.[11] The Syllabus Explorer represents the "largest collection of searchable syllabi ever amassed."[12]

Methodology

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]

Notable findings
A chart, with data from the Open Syllabus Project, showing the most assigned books in college from each of the 50 U.S. states.

Anthropology

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]

Economics

The database indicates Greg Mankiw is the most frequently cited author for college economics courses.[23]

English literature

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]

Female writers

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]

Film

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]

History

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]

Philosophy

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]

Physics

David Halliday's et al. Fundamentals of Physics is the number one ranked physics textbook in the OSP's database.[36]

Political science

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]

Public administration

American president Woodrow Wilson's article "The Study of Administration" was the most frequently assigned text in public affairs and administration syllabi.[39]

Reception

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]

See also

Notes
  1. McClure also serves as the project's Chief Technologist.[2]

References
  1. "Open Syllabus Inc". ProPublica. September 14, 2022. Retrieved 2022-09-28.
  2. "People". Open Syllabus Project. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  3. M. Beliso‐De Jesús, Aisha; Pierre, Jemima (March 2020). "Special Section: Anthropology of White Supremacy". American Anthropologist. Wiley-Blackwell. 122 (1): 6. doi:10.1111/aman.13351. ISSN 0002-7294. S2CID 213556202.
  4. Nowogrodzki, Anna (October 31, 2016). "Mining the secrets of college syllabuses". Nature. 539 (7627): 125–126. Bibcode:2016Natur.539..125N. doi:10.1038/539125a. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 27808216. S2CID 4466400.
  5. Herrera, Jack (2016-04-18). "Open Syllabus Project gives empirical insight into curriculum debates". The Stanford Daily. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  6. Noonan, Daniel W. (2015). "Does Size Matter in the Digital Age? Reappraisal Considerations for Syllabi". Archival Issues. 37 (1): 16. ISSN 1067-4993. JSTOR 24590114 – via JSTOR.
  7. "The Open Syllabus Project". The American Assembly. 30 January 2016. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  8. Ward, Alex (February 26, 2016). "Open Syllabus Project Releases Syllabus Explorer". Chicago Maroon. Retrieved 2022-09-30.
  9. Young, Jeffrey R. (2019-07-19). "How a Database of 6 Million Syllabi Could Spawn a New Measure of Scholarly Impact". EdSurge. Retrieved 2022-10-01.
  10. Schwab, Katharine (July 16, 2019). "This historic map of 6 million syllabi reveals how college is changing". Fast Company. Archived from the original on March 8, 2022.
  11. Graham, Shawn; Milligan, Ian; Weingart, Scott B.; Martin, Kimberley (2022-02-24). Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope (2nd ed.). World Scientific. p. 13. doi:10.1142/p981. ISBN 978-981-12-4305-9.
  12. Hubbard, David E.; Vaaler, Alyson (2021-01-01). "An exploratory study of library science journal articles in syllabi". The Journal of Academic Librarianship. Elsevier. 47 (1): 102261. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102261. ISSN 0099-1333. S2CID 228830827.
  13. Beckwith, Ryan Teague (September 7, 2019). "Trump Changed U.S. Politics. Now He's Changing Political Science". Bloomberg.
  14. Delli, K.; Livas, C.; Spijkervet, F.K.L.; Vissink, A. (May 16, 2017). "Measuring the social impact of dental research: An insight into the most influential articles on the Web". Oral Diseases. Wiley-Blackwell. 23 (8): 1156. doi:10.1111/odi.12714. PMID 28734099.
  15. Friedman, Alon (2018-03-15). "Measuring the promise of Big Data syllabi". Technology, Pedagogy and Education. Routledge. 27 (2): 137. doi:10.1080/1475939X.2017.1408490. ISSN 1475-939X. S2CID 67092462.
  16. Rikard, Andrew (2016-08-04). "More Than a Million Syllabuses at Your Fingertips". EdSurge. Retrieved 2022-10-02.
  17. Daniels, Jessie; Thistlethwaite, Polly (2016-07-29). Being a Scholar in the Digital Era: Transforming Scholarly Practice for the Public Good. Policy Press. p. 122. doi:10.1332/policypress/9781447329251.001.0001. ISBN 978-1-4473-2925-1.
  18. Rutherford, Markella; Levitt, Peggy (2020-11-04). "Who's on the Syllabus?: World Literature According to the US Pedagogical Canon". Journal of World Literature. Brill Publishers. 5 (4): 621. doi:10.1163/24056480-00504009. ISSN 2405-6472. S2CID 228898017.
  19. Munguia, Hayley (2016-02-19). "Everyone Still Reads 'To Kill A Mockingbird'". FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved 2022-10-03.
  20. Ingraham, Christopher (February 3, 2016). "What Ivy League students are reading that you aren't". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2022-09-29.
  21. Barron, Nicholas (July 2021). "Renegades or liberals? Recent reflections on the Boasian legacies in American anthropology". History of the Human Sciences. SAGE Publications. 34 (3–4): 368. doi:10.1177/0952695120941195. ISSN 0952-6951. S2CID 225384693.
  22. Craven, Christa (March 9, 2021). "Teaching Antiracist Citational Politics as a Project of Transformation: Lessons from the Cite Black Women Movement for White Feminist Anthropologists". Feminist Anthropology. Wiley-Blackwell. 2 (1): 4–5. doi:10.1002/fea2.12036. ISSN 2643-7961. S2CID 233623512.
  23. Schwittay, Anke (October 2021). Creative Universities: Reimagining Education for Global Challenges and Alternative Futures. Bristol University Press. p. 79. ISBN 978-1-5292-1365-2.
  24. Scott, Amanda (2019-10-10). Pilkington, Olga A.; Pilkington, Ace G. (eds.). Lab Lit: Exploring Literary and Cultural Representations of Science. Lexington Books. p. 13. ISBN 978-1-4985-6599-8.
  25. Prose, Francine (2016-06-16). "How Frankenstein's Monster Became Human". The New Republic. ISSN 0028-6583. Retrieved 2022-10-03.
  26. Finn, Ed; Guston, David H. (2017-12-29). "'Frankenstein' Has Become a True Monster". The Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2022-10-10.
  27. Manshel, Alexander (2021-03-23). "Colson Whitehead's History of the United States". MELUS. Oxford University Press. 45 (4): 24. doi:10.1093/melus/mlaa051. ISSN 0163-755X.
  28. Johnson, David (February 25, 2016). "These Are the 100 Most-Read Female Writers in College Classes". Time. Retrieved 2022-09-28.
  29. Gump, Steven E. (October 2019). "Kate L. Turabian. A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers". Journal of Scholarly Publishing. University of Toronto Press. 51 (1): 100. doi:10.3138/jsp.51.1.06. ISSN 1198-9742. S2CID 210531081.
  30. Johnson, Alex (2018-05-08). "What are students reading at the best universities?". The Independent. Retrieved 2022-10-09.
  31. Mumford, Tracy (March 1, 2016). "The 25 most frequently assigned women authors". MPR News. Retrieved 2022-10-09.
  32. Dam, Andrew Van (2022-09-09). "States with the worst brain drain — and more!". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2022-10-04.
  33. Ha, Thu-Huong (2016-01-27). "These are the books students at the top US colleges are required to read". Quartz. Retrieved 2022-10-02.
  34. Baltzly, Dirk; Miles, Graeme; Finamore, John F., eds. (2018-06-30). Proclus: Commentary on Plato's Republic. Cambridge University Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-1-108-56293-5.
  35. Marks, Jonathan (2021-02-09). Let's Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education. Princeton University Press. p. 110. ISBN 978-0-691-20771-1.
  36. Paoletti, Teo; Lee, Hwa Young; Rahman, Zareen; Vishnubhotla, Madhavi; Basu, Debasmita (2022-06-01). "Comparing graphical representations in mathematics, science, and engineering textbooks and practitioner journals". International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology. Taylor & Francis. 53 (7): 8. Bibcode:2022IJMES..53.1815P. doi:10.1080/0020739X.2020.1847336. ISSN 0020-739X. S2CID 230533709.
  37. Matthews, Sally (2020-07-02). "Reviewing the South African Political Studies Curriculum: Evaluating Responses to Calls for Decolonisation". Politikon. Routledge. 47 (3): 335–336. doi:10.1080/02589346.2020.1796000. ISSN 0258-9346. S2CID 221115270.
  38. Sumner, Jane Lawrence (April 2018). "The Gender Balance Assessment Tool (GBAT): A Web-Based Tool for Estimating Gender Balance in Syllabi and Bibliographies". PS: Political Science & Politics. Cambridge University Press. 51 (2): 396–400. doi:10.1017/S1049096517002074. ISSN 1049-0965. S2CID 159013812.
  39. Herbel, Jerry (2018-07-03). "Humanism and bureaucracy: The case for a liberal arts conception of public administration". Journal of Public Affairs Education. Routledge. 24 (3): 402. doi:10.1080/15236803.2018.1429819. ISSN 1523-6803. S2CID 158882673.
  40. Germano, William; Nicholls, Kit (2022-08-30). Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything. Princeton University Press. p. 41. ISBN 978-0-691-19221-5.
  41. Caferro, William (2019-10-08). Teaching History (1st ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 67. ISBN 978-1-119-14712-1.
  42. Kirtley, Susan E.; Garcia, Antero; Carlson, Peter E., eds. (2020). With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning, and Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. pp. 54–55. ISBN 978-1-4968-2603-9 – via Project MUSE.
  43. Losh, Elizabeth (2017-12-14). "Rapid Response: DIY Curricula from FemTechNet to Crowd-Sourced Syllabi". In Ostherr, Kirsten (ed.). Applied Media Studies (1 ed.). New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315473857. ISBN 978-1-315-47385-7.

Further reading
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