The Open Syllabus Project

The Open Syllabus Project is a nonprofit archive of teaching. It offers top-down views of the curriculum across different schools to support curricular innovation, learning, and student success.

The project was established at The American Assembly, a public policy institute associated with Columbia University. It became independent in 2019.

The OSP helps instructors develop classes, libraries manage collections, and presses develop books. It possesses a corpus of eighteen million English-language syllabi from 140 countries. The platform utilizes machine learning and other techniques to get citations, dates, fields, and other metadata from these documents.

The retrieved data is made available via four online tools:

• The Syllabus Explorer: This offers open access to citation data from the archive. It portrays the frequency at which titles are assigned on various subjects, what they're assigned with, and how it has changed over time.
• Open Syllabus Analytics: This is the "pro" version of the Syllabus Explorer. It was created for institutional subscription by staff at colleges, universities, publishers, and high schools. The pro version has more curricula navigation and analysis features and offers more information about assignment context.
• The Co-Assignment Galaxy: This is a plot of the top million titles in the Open Syllabus dataset, classified by the frequency of which they are assigned together.
• The Coursematcher: This predicts course equivalence across the catalogs of schools as a way to support the process of course transfer for students and college staff.