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What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us

nytimes.com

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Re: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us

#21
post #7
post #6

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.

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.

like the GP, I was also disappointed not to have links to the original syllabi if it's available online.

For subjects like Human Anatomy, the list of potential books is very limited, but I'm more interested in how the course is structured. Which anatomical structures or body regions are highlighted or covered, whether the syllabi uses systems or regional approach etc.

Re: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us

#22
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.

Re: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us

#23
post #9

Interesting. It would be nice to see mathematics.

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

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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