The Open Syllabus Project: Friend or foe? |

"A colleague recently shared an article from the New York Times that featured a collaborative effort out of Columbia University titled The Open Syllabus Project (OSP). Over a million syllabi have been collected and analyzed since the project’s inception and some of the data is now available on its OSP Explorer site. By navigating the OSP Explorer site, instructors can examine which texts are being taught in which courses to get a better sense of what colleagues at other institutions are doing. The site also ranks the texts based on a complex “Teaching Score” which attempts to capture the frequency with which an individual text is used based on syllabi and assignments. While the OSP is an interesting and innovative initiative, the data being shared is at times educational, inspiring and worrisome. For instance, if an instructor wanted to revise their syllabus and wanted to see what colleagues at a particular institution was using to teach a class, the OSP Explorer provides rankings for certain universities. This could be helpful information, especially for someone who was assigned to teach a course for the first time. By the navigating the site, an instructor could see what faculty at a similar institution was using for certain content areas. Definitely an educational opportunity. The inspiring part is seeing the diversity of journal articles and texts being used. Across the million of syllabi that the project has analyzed, the OSP Explorer identifies over 900,000 different texts across different disciplines. It also connects directly to citation catalogs like JStor and the Harvard Library Open Metadata. The site allows instructors to see which texts were taught together to give a sense of the landscape of a discipline. As I dug deep into my areas of expertise, I found it interesting to see certain text pairings. It’s like a chef seeing a certain ingredient combination and being inspired to try something new. “Maybe those texts would provide students with a novel way of looking at an issue. Hmmmm…”