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What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us
- jimhefferon 11y agoInteresting. It would be nice to see mathematics.
- category 11y agoI am surprised math isn't included. At least, there's computer science. BTW, I like your free Linear Algebra book.
- jkaraganis 11y agoI scraped several 10Ks of math syllabi, so I know they're in there. Not sure why the field got zapped as a filter. To be fixed in v.5
- jimhefferon 11y agoThank you. I find I cannot hear that enough. :-)
- danso 11y agoIs there any kind of proposed standard for the metadata of a syllabus? I'd love to use it myself, I find myself recreating my own syllabi as a plaintext (Markdown) document, over and over, when it seems like the recipe is clear enough to do it in a way that can easily be converted into machine-readable metadata.
- clured 11y agoNo, I don't believe there is, but something like that would be fantastic. I believe some universities in the UK publish reading lists in XML format, but I don't know of any US universities that do that. It would certainly make this kind of citation analysis much easier and more accurate. Syllabi are tricky to work with because there's basically no standardization in how texts are referenced / assigned. Sometimes there's a full, structured bibliographic citation, but more often it's just a title / author pair, and the formatting can vary widely. It's an interesting information extraction problem.
- jkaraganis 11y agoOther author here... There is this new W3C initiative: https://www.w3.org/community/schema-course-extend/ https://www.w3.org/community/schema-course-extend/
- danso 11y agoThanks! Excellent article btw
- jkaraganis 11y agoMore generally, we decided that trying to get faculty to adopt better structured authoring tools for syllabi was hopeless. There are lots of good, unused syllabus-building tools.
- echochar 11y agoIs it possible to download the bulk data, e.g. CSV files via FTP, for noncommercial use in a personal database?
- wespad 11y agoWhen ever I want to learn something on my own, especially a comparative study, I include the search terms "syllabus' and 'reading list'. I figure there must be a class somewhere that has already covered this ground.
- Fomite 11y agoAlso try that subject and "journal club".
- SeanLuke 11y agoSomething's wrong here. My department has public, well archived, trivially crawlable syllabi going back to 2002. So I did a search of my own department's syllabi using the provided database, and discovered: zero of the entries returned are syllabi. They're just references to books.
- clured 11y agoCo-author here. Yes, this UI is showing metadata extracted from the syllabi (namely, text assignments). Not the documents themselves, which, unfortunately, we're unable to make public for a mix of copyright and privacy reasons.
- SeanLuke 11y agoWhy do you need to provide the documents? Why not just provide links to them? Google can do this with no legal issues: surely you can too.
- gingerlime 11y agolike the GP, I was also disappointed not to have links to the original syllabi if it's available online. For subjects like Human Anatomy, the list of potential books is very limited, but I'm more interested in how the course is structured. Which anatomical structures or body regions are highlighted or covered, whether the syllabi uses systems or regional approach etc.
- batbomb 11y agoI used to use "syllabus" and a book names/authors to find parallel course material in Google for college. It helped me immensely, because I could find many examples of online lecture notes, exams, homework solutions, and other materials which weren't available to me. I think this is harder today as many schools move towards consolidates, closed-off systems for managing their resources.
- tomcam 11y agoApparently a million is insufficient to teach that the plural is syllabi. Edit: user whyenot illustrated what I should have investigated myself, which is that "syllabuses" is totally fine. Ouch! Downvotes richly deserved!
- punee 11y agoOkay, I really like this and have thought about creating something similar before... BUT. I think you're missing an essential piece of the puzzle if you don't provide, short of the syllabi themselves, at least the ORDER in which the books are supposed to be read. What's interesting about the syllabi is their structure more than their content.