Category Archives: oa.syllabi

Open Syllabus Analytics: A New Service from Open Syllabus

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“This informational webinar will be used to introduce viewers to Open Syllabus Analytics. Open Syllabus Analytics (OSA) is a massive archive of the main activity of higher education: teaching. It provides top-down views of syllabi across thousands of schools to help faculty, staff, and publishers improve student outcomes. The service is flexible and effective across multiple use cases, including library collection development, a new OER Module for tracking OER adoption, curriculum aid for teachers and graduate students, and more….”

Open Syllabus Analytics: A New Service from Open Syllabus

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“This informational webinar will be used to introduce viewers to Open Syllabus Analytics. Open Syllabus Analytics (OSA) is a massive archive of the main activity of higher education: teaching. It provides top-down views of syllabi across thousands of schools to help faculty, staff, and publishers improve student outcomes. The service is flexible and effective across multiple use cases, including library collection development, tracking OER adoption, curriculum aid for teachers and graduate students, and more.”

 

 

The Open Syllabus Project

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“Open Syllabus is pleased to announce the receipt of a $1,750,000, 2-year grant from the Arcadia Fund.

The Arcadia grant will enable Open Syllabus to continue to expand the boundaries of open education by developing new ways to understand and navigate the curriculum in higher education.  The grant will support work on course transfer and learning outcomes, as well as a range of new tools designed to make OS data a more powerful resource for students, faculty, and lifelong learners….”

UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science | Wikiversity | Week 10: Open Science Infrastructures

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“…Week 10: Open Science Infrastructures

Learning Outcomes

Explain the role of infrastructure in making open science possible
Describe gaps in the current infrastructure of open science
Describe challenges in making open science infrastructure, inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable.

Readings

“Whose Infrastructure? Towards Inclusive and Collaborative Knowledge Infrastructures in Open Science” by Angela Okune, Rebecca Hillyer, Denisse Albornoz, Alejandro Posada, Leslie Chan in ELPUB, Toronto, Canada; 2018, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.[24] 20 pages. “Open is Not Forever: A Study of Vanished Open Access Journals” by Laakso, M., Matthias, L., & Jahn, N in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2021. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.[25] 14 pages.

Discussion Question

Identify an example of infrastructure relevant to your research context. Describe one strength and one weakness of this infrastructure. Focus on the extent to which your example is inclusive, collaborative, and/ or sustainable.  Conclude your post with a question for others in the class. Alternative discussion question: If you (as discussion leader) can identify one or two examples of open infrastructure familiar to your class and relevant to their research context, have the class apply concepts from the reading to evaluate the specific example(s) on dimensions of inclusivity, collaboration, and sustainability. This week also offers the opportunity for an open data activity using this dataset on open access journals: Vanished Open Access Journals (Version 3) by Laakso, M., Matthias, L., & Jahn, N. available on Zenodo, Meyrin, Switzerland: CERN, 2020….”

Get A Beautiful Open Syllabus Poster To Support Techdirt And The Open Syllabus Project | Techdirt

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“Open Syllabus is a very cool non-profit research organization, spun out of the American Assembly at Columbia University, that collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to better understand what materials are being used to educate people in classes around the world. It currently has a corpus of nine million English-language syllabi from 140 countries and has done a bunch of research based on this data. Most of these syllabi are collected by scouring the open web (though some are submitted directly), and the end result is a very handy Open Syllabus explorer that allows you to take deep dives into what’s being taught in various subjects, at various schools and more. Want to know what are the top titles taught for computer science? Or Economics? Or Political Science? They’ve got the details and more.

And, recently, Open Syllabus used a bunch of that data to make amazing, beautiful posters, taking the top 600 or so assigned titles in certain fields, and creating “galaxy maps” highlighting the clusters of works and how often certain works are assigned together with one another. They’re educational and stunning to look at….”

Welcome to Open Syllabus 2.5

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“Today we’re releasing a big update to Open Syllabus data and websites. Here’s a rundown:

The Co-Assignment Galaxy

The Galaxy has received a massive upgrade in scale and functionality. The previous version mapped 164,000 titles and could display 30,000 at a time. The new version maps 1.1 million titles and can display 500,000 at a time. The resolution of fields and subfields is vastly improved as a result….

OER Metrics

OER Metrics is a new subsite for investigating trends and adoption patterns for openly-licensed books and textbooks (i.e., Open Educational Resources). It provides the first tools for mapping the demand side of the OER ecosystem and–we hope–can help inform adoption decisions by instructors and programs and investment decisions by authors, publishers, and funders….”

How Much Traction do Open Access / Open Educational Resources have in the Classroom?

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“Open Access (OA) monographs and Open Educational Resource (OER) textbooks are works that are ‘openly licensed’ — that is, they can be used and distributed for free. In a world of $200 textbooks, OA/OER plays a fairly high-profile role in efforts to reduce the cost of education.

But free circulation makes it difficult to track classroom adoption, which in turn makes it difficulty to understand the shape of demand for OA/OER work–either overall or with respect to particular subjects. The link between supply and demand established in the commercial book market by a sale doesn’t exist in the OA/OER world. Our thought is that this delinking is one reason–and maybe a significant reason–for the relatively low rate of adoption of OA/OER in teaching, despite over a decade of efforts. It’s still too hard to characterize demand for these titles to faculty, curricular designers, publishers, and investors. It’s hard to tell what’s popular and what’s been effectively adopted in peer institutions.

So we’re eager to see what happens when we partially close this information loop by measuring demand via syllabi. Here’s a normalized US trendline for OA/OER adoption based on the OS collection (drawing on catalog information from the Open Textbook Library and the Directory of Open Access Books). It shows rapid OER textbook growth in recent years–but from a very low baseline. In 2017, roughly 1 in 300 classes used OER textbooks and around 1 in 400 assigned an OA monograph (the lighter blue is for textbooks; darker for monographs)….”

Rethinking assessment during the pandemic, particularly re. disability equality | Martin Paul Eve | Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing

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The pandemic is not over. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill just went back for a week of in-person term. Seven days later, they have shut down, with over 500 students in isolation. They can now offer only remote tuition. So I repeat to those who are being optimistic about this year: no, the pandemic is not over, it is far from over, and there are many many challenges ahead. In this post I want to turn particularly to the challenge of access to library resources over the coming year for students, with particular reference to the disability equality implications.

The Open Syllabus Project

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“Welcome to The Open Syllabus Project 2.0. Now you can explore college teaching, publishing, and intellectual traditions across 6 million classes, 4700 schools, and 79 countries.

You can dive into schools and fields, look at how the adoption of texts changes over time, and compare how teaching varies in different countries.

So explore, let us know what you think, and give some thought to sharing your syllabi….”

The Open Syllabus Project maps out 6 million class syllabi

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“For decades, the syllabus has been the roadmap to college classes, listing homework, assignments, and most crucially, texts for students to read and reference. But while a syllabus might be able to teach students what they’re in for during the semester, academics have lacked a tool to analyze large masses of syllabi to better understand what teachers are teaching in different disciplines. That means there isn’t as much empirical data about the content being taught at universities.

The Open Syllabus Project aims to fix this problem. Researchers at the the American Assembly, a nonprofit housed within Columbia University, have collected an archive of more than six million syllabi from college courses all over the world that could help teachers to create new syllabi and researchers to garner a cross-cultural understanding of higher education.

The project first launched three years ago, but this new update has six times as many syllabi and search tools and visualizations designed to map out how academia works right now….”

What do syllabi-based altmetrics actually mean? – Altmetric

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” […] as the use of open educational resources continues to grow, we’re confident that syllabi mentions will become an increasingly useful way to evaluate the educational impacts of research. Hopefully, by raising the profile of such data, we can help accelerate that change.”