Peer Review

The Open Syllabus Project and Syllabus Explorer

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Reviewed:: Dec 9, 2017 by Psychology

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:: This is a website containing an exceptionally large number (over 1 million) of syllabi from a broad range of academic disciplines. The reported output is not full syllabi; rather, data are extracted from the syllabi to report such metrics as textbook usage across universities. The Project has excellent potential for faculty development as well as for curriculum and course development.
The About link provides the following descriptive information: The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) is an effort to create the first large-scale online database of university course syllabi as a platform for the development of new research, teaching, and administrative tools.
Type of Material:: Collection
Recommended Uses:: This website could be used as a data source for an assignment about higher education curriculum and other content presented in syllabi. Some of the older syllabi suggest that a historical view could be gleaned from using this website.
Technical Requirements:: There are no specific technical requirements. Any popular web browser will suffice.
Identify Major Learning Goals:: The purpose of this site is to collect course syllabi from public domains and individual faculty to create a searchable database of syllabi to answer curricular and other types of questions. After using this repository, students will be able to: • Identify data that can be mined from over 1 million college-level syllabi • Apply critical thinking skills to curricular and educational research.
Target Student Population:: The target population would likely be graduate/doctoral students studying education, higher education curricula, discipline-specific pedagogy and possibly other questions related to publishing and topics/content studied over time in higher education.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: Students would need to know how to conduct a search with the websites tool – the syllabus explorer - and then assess the information obtained from the results. Perhaps must importantly, students would need to ask appropriate research questions that could be answered by a search.

Content Quality

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Strengths:: • This database is novel and appears to produce accurate searches from the documents. Students could use this source to conduct secondary analyses related to textbooks and/or articles commonly used in psychology classes.
Concerns:: • There do not appear to be any major concerns with the quality of the website content though the applications for psychology students (and faculty) are somewhat limited.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

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Strengths:: • This website has a large collection of syllabi from institutions of higher education, which can be searched using a search tool. While complete syllabi are not available for viewing, an individual can search for textbooks and other readings listed on course syllabi across numerous disciplines.
Concerns:: • The site has not specifically been developed for use with students. There are no learning outcomes associated with this website, and no information for how it could be incorporated into a class. This is a research tool and could possibly be incorporated into a research course.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

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Strengths:: • This site itself is easy to navigate, written clearly, and is overall visually appealing in design. • As a database with a search feature, this website could be used to answer questions about curricula in psychology and other disciplines.
Concerns:: • There are no videos on how to search the database, and there appear to be a limited number of ways one can search the database (i.e., textbooks/citations by discipline, location, and institution).

Other Issues and Comments:: This website shows potential for helping to answer interesting research questions related to pedagogy and curricula. It is a resource primarily aimed toward faculty and administrators, not students. However, as noted in the review it may prove useful for certain doctoral-level work.
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