computer science

Open Syllabus Project

Open Syllabus Project is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Open Syllabus Project rather than just read about it. In short: The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) is an online open-source platform that catalogs and analyzes millions of college syllabi. Founded by researchers from the American Assembly at Columbia University, the OSP has amassed the most extensive collection of searchable syllabi.

Key takeaways

Open Syllabus Project belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Open Syllabus Project to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Open Syllabus Project from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) is an online open-source platform that catalogs and analyzes millions of college syllabi. 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.

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. Joe Karaganis, former vice-president of the American Assembly, serves as the project director of the OSP. 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). The OSP became a non-profit and independent of the American Assembly in November 2019. 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. 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. As of 2022, the OSP has collected over 7 million course syllabi. The Syllabus Explorer represents the "largest collection of searchable syllabi ever amassed."

Methodology The OSP has collected syllabi data from over 80 countries dating to 2000. The syllabi stem from over 4,000 worldwide institutions. Most of the OSP's data originates from the United States. Canada, Australia, and the U.K also have large datasets. The OSP primarily collects syllabi by scraping publicly accessible university websites. The OSP also allows syllabi submissions from faculty, students, and administrators. The OSP developers use machine learning and natural language processing to extract metadata from such syllabi. Since only metadata is collected, no individual syllabus or personal identifying information is found in the OSP database. The OSP classifies the syllabi into 62 subject fields – corresponding to the U.S. Department of Education's Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP). 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. The OSP also has data on which texts are most likely to be assigned together. The developers behind the OSP admit that the database is incomplete and likely contains "a fair number of errors." 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.

Notable findings

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." Black authors wrote less than 1 percent of the top 1,000 assigned works.

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

English literature The OSP found that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was the most widely taught novel in college courses. Additionally, the majority of novels published after 1945 taught in English classes were historical fiction.

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 . Turabian is followed by Diana Hacker, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf.

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.

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.

Philosophy The most assigned texts in the field of philosophy include Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, and Plato's Republic. 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).

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

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. In the top 200 most-frequently assigned works, 15 are authored by at least one woman.

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

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." Historian William Caferro remarks that the OSP is a "tacit experience of sharing, but a useful one." 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." 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."

See also Digital preservation List of Web archiving initiatives

Notes

References

Further reading Karaganis, Joe, ed. (2018). Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education. MIT Press. doi:10.7551/mitpress/11339.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-262-53501-4. OCLC 1052851639.

External links Official website Open Syllabus Galaxy

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Open Syllabus Project

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Open Syllabus Project claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Open Syllabus Project before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Open Syllabus Project ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Open Syllabus Project

In research: Open Syllabus Project appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Open Syllabus Project in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Open Syllabus Project is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 501(c)(3) organizations, Big data, Columbia University, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Open Syllabus Project outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Open Syllabus Project in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Open Syllabus Project means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Open Syllabus Project out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Open Syllabus Project in simple terms?

Why does Open Syllabus Project matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Open Syllabus Project?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Open Syllabus Project.