The Open Syllabus Explorer

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2016

The Syllabus Explorer leverages a collection of over one million syllabi collected from university and departmental websites.  It provides:

  • The first version of a new publication metric (Teaching Rank) based on how often texts are taught.

  • A unique course-building tool that provides information about what’s taught with what.

  • A promising means of exploring the history of fields, curricular change, and differences in teaching across institutions, states, and countries.

The Syllabus Explorer publishes only metadata (citations, dates, locations, etc) extracted from its collection via machine learning techniques.  It does not publish underlying documents or personally identifying information.

The Explorer is very much a work in progress.  As you may discover, it gets a lot of things wrong.  Fixes and improvements will be incremental. But it also gets a lot right, and makes curricula visible and navigable in ways that are valuable to authors, teachers, researchers, administrators, publishers, and students.

Available at: The Open Syllabus Explorer