Reference Database
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. Open Syllabus currently has a corpus of nine million English-language syllabi from 140 countries. It uses machine learning and other techniques to extract citations, dates, fields, and other metadata from these documents. The resulting data is made freely available via the Syllabus Explorer and for academic research. The project was founded at The American Assembly, a public policy institute associated with Columbia University. It has been independent since 2019. All of the syllabi in the current collection are English language documents – including from universities where English is not the primary teaching language.