Mining the secrets of college syllabuses : Nature News & Comment

"Despite a growing movement to glean insights from scholarly materials that are available online — from articles and data sets to conference presentations and lectures — one kind of academic document remains little examined. And that is the syllabus: a document that lays out the reading materials, topics and expectations of college courses.

That, at least, was the case until January this year, when data scientists, sociologists and digital-humanities researchers at Columbia University in New York City launched a tool called the Open Syllabus Explorer. This integrates more than 1 million publicly available syllabuses and lays open their data in a conveniently searchable format. A version containing three times as many syllabuses is scheduled to launch in January 2017."