The Open Syllabus Project: Unveiling Insights into Higher Education
The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) is an ambitious initiative that seeks to collect, analyze, and share data from college syllabi to provide insights into higher education. With a database of over one million syllabi, the OSP offers a unique lens through which to examine pedagogical practices, curriculum trends, and the intellectual landscape of academia.
What is the Open Syllabus Project?
The Open Syllabus Project is an initiative that has collected and mapped over one million syllabi from college-level courses. By aggregating and analyzing these syllabi, the OSP aims to shed light on what texts are assigned in college courses, providing valuable data for educators, researchers, and students alike. The project also released the Syllabus Explorer, a search function which enables visitors to see what texts are most commonly assigned by location and field of study.
Accessing and Utilizing the Open Syllabus Explorer
It’s also quite easy for users to extract data from searches of the Open Syllabus Explorer. The Syllabus Explorer is a search function which enables visitors to see what texts are most commonly assigned by location and field of study.
Analyzing Sociology Texts with the Open Syllabus Project
The OSP data can be used to analyze trends and patterns within specific disciplines. One such analysis focused on the top 500 sociology texts assigned in college courses. This analysis involved extracting metadata and rankings for these texts and manually adding information such as the author's year of birth, year of death (if applicable), gender, and the text's year of first publication.
Authors: Demographics and Representation
Analyzing the authors of the top 500 sociology texts revealed that 60% of the authors are currently alive. This suggests that sociology, as a field focused on the study of present-day society, may have a stronger bias toward recent scholarship compared to fields like history or literature.
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However, the analysis also revealed that female authors are underrepresented in the corpus, with only 18% of the top 500 texts written by women. This disparity raises questions about the representation of female voices in sociology and could encourage conversations about the trajectory of female authors in the field.
Author's Age and Publication Year
The addition of dates of birth and death for authors and the year of publication for the top 500 texts leads to two interesting analyses. The analysis of author's age at the time of publication showed that half of the texts were published by authors aged 38 to 54, with a median age of 45. Further analysis comparing male and female authors revealed differences in their publishing ages, with women showing a lack of authorship below the age of 39 and a visible lack of authorship between 29 and 32.
Examining the publication years of assigned texts revealed that the most well-represented year was 1995, during which twenty of the top 500 texts were released. However, texts published prior to 1950 also hold significant weight, indicating the continued importance of foundational sociology texts.
The Communist Manifesto and its Prominence in Syllabi
The Open Syllabus Project has also sparked debates about the prominence of certain texts in college curricula. One such debate revolves around Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto," which appears on a significant number of syllabi across various disciplines.
Accounting for different versions of its title, Marx’s Communist Manifesto appears on a total of 3856 syllabi in the Open Syllabus Project database. That makes it the second most used text in academia after the popular writing style manual by Strunk and White (3934 syllabi) - a book that’s usually assigned to help college students with their composition habits for writing term papers. Of those 3856 Communist Manifesto hits, only 103 - or 2.67% - are on syllabi in Marx’s own primary academic discipline, economics. The rest are in fields that venture far astray from economics, with the highest concentrations coming from the humanities. Marx’s Communist Manifesto far exceeds the syllabus frequency of virtually any other author or work in all of human history with the possible exception of Plato. Locke (Second Treatise) - 1045It continues downward from there into increasing obscurity. From these stats, it may be easily observed that Marx’s Communist Manifesto appears on syllabi at a frequency that is often 2, 3, or 4X that of other thinkers of comparable prominence. Again, Plato is the only one who even comes close.
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The prominence of the "Communist Manifesto" on syllabi raises questions about its relevance and influence in contemporary academia. While some argue that its presence reflects Marx's enduring impact on various fields, others suggest that it may be due to a disproportionate affinity for his thought among university faculty, particularly those outside of economics.
The observed syllabus chart-topping popularity is no general feature of Marx himself, but specific to Marx’s Communist Manifesto. The acknowledged academic proliferation of commie chic is therefore insufficient to explain Marx’s overall dominance of the rankings. This secondary finding would appear to further dampen the prospects of Explanation A above, namely that Marx somehow landed himself on the very top of the list of the most important, influential, far-reaching, and consequential figures of all time. Rather, university faculty simply have an abnormally pronounced affinity for assigning his bombastic little propaganda pamphlet at rates that far exceed every single other writer in human history, ever.
Reclaiming the Syllabus: From Contract to Invitation
Beyond analyzing existing syllabi, the OSP also inspires discussions about the role and design of syllabi themselves. Some educators advocate for a shift from viewing the syllabus as a contract to seeing it as an invitation to join a learning community.
We are used to thinking about the syllabus as a kind of “contract” that explains what the course is about, specifies what the requirements are, lists what kind of assessments will be used, and sets out a schedule of activities, lectures and assignments. While these documents serve a purpose, they are often formidable and make for dry reading. In keeping with a broader shift that I made several years ago to build more collaboration and interaction into the classes I teach, I now think about syllabi as “invitations” to join a learning community. I use the first person plural to indicate that we are all in this together.
This approach involves incorporating collaboration and interaction into the syllabus design process, inviting students to help develop learning objectives and identify the skills and dispositions they need to succeed. By involving students in the syllabus creation process, educators can foster a sense of ownership and engagement in the course.
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I decided to take this approach one step further for a course I taught on Contemporary Russia a while back, by asking the students to help develop the learning objectives and identify the skills and dispositions they needed to succeed. I did this in part because I was interested in how students would respond to the invitation to help map out the course. I knew what I wanted them to learn, but I wanted to know what their goals were as well. And because the course focused on Contemporary Russia, which by virtue of its youth is still an emerging topic of historical inquiry, I thought there might be some synergy between the evolving subject of the course and a dynamic course design process.
Collaborative Syllabus Design in Practice
One example of collaborative syllabus design involved a course on Contemporary Russia. The instructor invited students to help develop the learning objectives and identify the skills and dispositions they needed to succeed in the course.
The syllabus is labeled “preliminary” because it needs your input. I have designated some objectives for the course (see below), and invite you to help me articulate how the group would like to achieve them over the first few class sessions. The tentative class schedule lays out a road map for topics and standard readings (from the required texts), and I have identified some “tangibles” for everyone who completes the course (see Course Requirements). I also have assembled a suite of digital tools and resources to help us leverage our collective efforts and take advantage of the Athenaeum’s affordances (some of which will be arriving or coming on line in the next few weeks). I invite you to help me finalize the particulars in accordance with the interests, aptitudes and preferences of the group. There is a portion of the material that will serve as a common core for everyone. In addition, each learner will develop expertise on a particular issue or event that interests them. I find that conventional assessment schemes interface poorly with the kinds of learning and habits of mind this course is designed to cultivate. We will talk in person about the kinds of feedback and evaluation that are best suited to our needs this term, and you will have a voice in defining those mechanisms.
Through group work and discussions, students identified their learning goals, which included understanding the role and significance of Vladimir Putin and perceptions of Russia in the United States. This collaborative process helped the instructor tailor the course content to meet the students' interests and needs.
Generating these LO’s helped me understand several things: what students were interested in; what they thought was important; and how limited their sense of “Russia” was. They were very concerned about international relations, and perceptions of Russia in the United States. They had little sense of the society, culture, or even key events and personalities beyond Vladimir Putin. And geographically they conflated the Russian Federation with all of what had been “Soviet” space, including most of Eastern Europe. But identifying these issues helped me know where and how to start.
The final version of the collaborative syllabus included sections on class-developed expectations for participation, instructions for the instructor, and student goals for content expertise and learning preferences. This collaborative approach helped put students and their goals and concerns at the center of the pedagogy.
You’ll see that we put a lot of emphasis on our expectations for each other. There is a section on “Class-Developed Expectations for “A” work in participation (leading and contributing to discussion, responding to others’ work and ideas). This was worth 25% of the final grade and ended up being fairly detailed. I started working on this section by asking everyone to think about and write down what they would consider “A” work in this area, and then we formatted (with color and emphasis) the items that had the most salience in the individual responses. Since we spent so much time talking about what students expected of themselves and each other, it seemed reasonable to spell out some instructions for the instructor as well. I had the group do this without me present so they would feel less constrained by what I might think of their individual preferences. Because the discussions of expectations kept expanding, I ended up including sections devoted to student goals for content expertise (what they would know about Russia at the end of the term) and learning preferences (which helped us acknowledge that everyone has preferred learning modalities, class formats, assignment preferences, etc.).
Openly Accessible Syllabi: A Valuable Resource
Making syllabi openly accessible online offers numerous benefits. Syllabi are often the first point of contact with students. An important benefit to the widespread adoption of the OSM is that all our syllabi are accessible to students and parents (e.g., during registration). Viewed as an open-source distribution point, the OSM provides a potentially powerful source of information to educate our wider constituencies and publics about the how education happens at a publicly-funded university.
However, there may be a risk of a flattening effect built into the structure of the OSM. Dr. Benson describes, for example, how, “the online system will allow me to add instructor-specific components to my syllabus, the system will not allow me to determine where these instructor-specific components are placed, nor will it include these instructor-specific components when I copy a syllabus from one semester to the next.” That the OSM automatically populates required syllabus elements saves precious time.
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