Open Syllabus 2.5 Released, Includes New OER Metrics Tool

From an Open Syllabus Website and Blog Post:

Open Syllabus is a non-profit research organization that collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support novel teaching and learning applications.  Open Syllabus helps instructors develop classes, libraries manage collections, and presses develop books.  It supports students and lifelong learners in their exploration of topics and fields.  It creates incentives for faculty to improve teaching materials and to use open licenses.  It supports work on aligning higher education with job market needs and on making student mobility easier.  It also challenges faculty and universities to work together to steward this important data resource.

From the Open Syllabus Blog:

What’s New in Version 2.5:

The Co-Assignment Galaxy

The Galaxy has received a massive upgrade in scale and functionality. The previous version mapped 164,000 titles and could display 30,000 at a time. The new version maps 1.1 million titles and can display 500,000 at a time. The resolution of fields and subfields is vastly improved as a result.

The Galaxy also implements a much-requested ‘search by topic’ function, which searches against the full text of syllabi rather than titles and authors–though you can still do that too. Results are now heat mapped to help users zoom in on areas of interest. David McClure has written up a detailed technical post on the new Galaxy for those who want a look under the hood.

OER Metrics

OER Metrics is a new subsite for investigating trends and adoption patterns for openly-licensed books and textbooks (i.e., Open Educational Resources). It provides the first tools for mapping the demand side of the OER ecosystem and–we hope–can help inform adoption decisions by instructors and programs and investment decisions by authors, publishers, and funders.

Link Lab

Link Lab is an exploration of ‘non-traditional’ teaching materials in the collection identified by URLs in the syllabi. These links are then walked back to their source to collect titles, authors, and other metadata. Link Lab picks up newspaper and magazine stories, videos and documentaries, blog posts, and other materials that are frequently taught but rarely recognized or curated as teaching materials. We are working on integrating URL identification into the main dataset. In the meantime, the preliminary data is presented here as a Lab.

The 2.5 Dataset

The Syllabus Explorer, Galaxy, and other services are now using version 2.5 of the OS dataset, which represents a big improvement over the previous 2.0 version. Among the highlights:

It adds 2018 data, bringing the total to 7.2 million syllabi.

Learn More, Read the Complete Blog Post

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