A look at the use of magazines, videos, blogs, and other nontraditional teaching materials — with some caveats.

"Open Syllabus depends on bibliographic catalogs to describe the world of titles that can be found in its syllabus collection. Because we’ve gotten better at managing these catalogs, the new 2.5 dataset expands the range of distinct titles found from 1.7 million to 4.6 million.

Some of the contributing catalogs, such as the Library of Congress catalog, contain movies, musical compositions, and other non-textual materials. But they don’t keep pace with the proliferation of web, video, and periodical resources available to teachers.

Over the summer, we made a catalog of these materials ourselves by analyzing the URLs in syllabi. This method has some clear strengths. It opens up the teaching world of YouTube for the first time. It can identify podcast episodes, blog posts, software tools, and web-based teaching resources...."