New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Open Syllabus Project

In comments on Ned Hall's guest post, Stefan Heßbrüggen points us to the Open Syllabus Project: 

The OSP’s mission is to build a large-scale online collection of syllabi and to build foundational tools for analyzing it in order to advance scholarly inquiry, promote institutional cooperation, and foster pedagogical diversity. We believe that this critical mass of syllabi will stimulate new research tools, drive policy change, foster best practices, provide new metrics, and aid in the search, discovery, and the development of new course materials....

Now, we need your help. We have data, but we need more. Whether a few sheets or a few terabytes, please consider helping us to build this collective dataset. In return, we release a rich dataset of metadata to the public, while protecting the original documents in a secure “research sandbox” environment. Talk to your administrators, share your university, college, departmental, or private collections. Let’s use the data we have to drive institutional change, to experiment, and to innovate in this area.

 

We need MOOTs, not MOOCs!

-- A guest post by Ned Hall (Harvard)

MOOCs and MOOTs are different things, and we should be working a lot more on the latter than the former. A MOOT is a Massive Open Online Text, a flexible on-line teaching tool that combines searchable, comment-on-able text, multimedia, tools for peer-to-peer collaboration and feedback, and who knows what other goodies we haven't thought of yet.

The big advantage of MOOTs over MOOCs is that you spend your time on pedagogical innovation, not on designing what could only be cut-rate assessment, feedback, and cheater-detection.