The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles the Open Syllabus Project, a new effort to build a large-scale online database of syllabi “as a platform for the development of new research, teaching, and administrative tools.” The scholars involved in the project hope to use the database for research “into the conversation about scholarly communication, from tracking the use of open-access publications to measuring how frequently, and in what contexts, faculty members’ works are taught.” The project does not plan to make the individual syllabi in its corpus publicly available at this point. Instead, the plan is to add tools to the project’s website that will allow users to search and analyze data extracted from that archive.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-syllabus-archive-opens-the-curricular-black-box/51285