New Article: “Mining the Secrets of College Syllabuses”

From a Nature.com:

The team behind the tool, the Open Syllabus Project (OSP), hope to nudge universities towards making more syllabuses public. They argue that doing so could aid textbook authors, instructors and course developers, and would reward the design of effective teaching materials, which is largely overlooked by conventional measures of academic effort.
“Syllabuses are among the most important documents written by scholars which are not yet widely shared, and they ought to be,” says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project and the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who serves on the OSP advisory board. “They reflect serious scholarly judgements about what’s worth teaching.”
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The OSP distils those data down to a single metric called the teaching score, which indicates how often a text is assigned in syllabuses. It can take any value from 1 (rarely taught) to 100 (frequently taught).
According to Suber, teaching scores are an alternative to conventional metrics of scholarly impact. They reflect the burgeoning ‘alternative metrics’ ethos, which aims to quantify the whole of a person’s research output. “I think this teaching score can take part in the new alt-metrics movement and give us a more sensitive measurement of the impact of texts,” he says.

Read the Complete Article
Direct to Open Syllabus Project (OSP)
See Also:  Partnerships: Altmetric is Now Integrating Book Data From Open Syllabus Project Into Records (September 2, 2016)
See Also: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us (Jan. 22, 2016; via NY Times)
Written by OSP leadership.

Filed under: Data Files, Management and Leadership, News, Open Access