
What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us - clured
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/what-a-million-syllabuses-can-teach-us.html
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SeanLuke
Something'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.

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clured
Co-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.

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SeanLuke
Why 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.

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wespad
When 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.

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Fomite
Also try that subject and "journal club".

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danso
Is 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.

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clured
No, 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.

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jkaraganis
More 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.

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elviejo
Examples of such tools? Preferably open source

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batbomb
I 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.

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punee
Okay, 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.

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jimhefferon
Interesting. It would be nice to see mathematics.

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category
I am surprised math isn't included. At least, there's computer science. BTW, I
like your free Linear Algebra book.

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jkaraganis
I 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

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echochar
Is it possible to download the bulk data, e.g. CSV files via FTP, for
noncommercial use in a personal database?

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tomcam
Apparently 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!

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whyenot
Nice snark, but, syllabuses is also acceptable.

[http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/syllabus](http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/syllabus)

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tomcam
Touché! Snark retracted. Thanks for the correction.

