“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….”
“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….”
“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….”
“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….”