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Share Syllabi

Please consider contributing your syllabi to the Open Syllabus archive. If you're willing to do so, send them attached to an email to: share@opensyllabus.org.

If you are in a position to get your program, college, or university involved, send us a note at contact@opensyllabus.org.

What we do with syllabi:​

Open Syllabus has several tools that make use of syllabi in different ways.

  1. The Open Syllabus Explorer publishes aggregrated citation data on a rolling 4-year delayed basis. It does not provide information about individual syllabi. We are also building a public collection that we will index to assigned titles and make available for download. If you are willing to share on this basis, please put 'public' in the email subject line. Otherwise, syllabi are private by default in the Explorer.
  2. Open Syllabus Analytics publishes the aggregated data from the Explorer and also an abbreviated, anonymized view of every syllabus in the collection. This view consists of the title, code, date, institution, description, learning outcomes, and assigned titles. Open Syllabus Analytics requires an account and is restricted to users working in or around higher education. College and university institutional subscribers can, additionally, elect to 'turn on' their school's collection for their own user communities.
  3. Open Syllabus makes anonymized, partial versions of this dataset available for academic research. We also license anonymized, aggregated data to publishing and library services for purposes such as catalog enrichment and recommendations.
  4. We are also trying to expand beyond US and anglophone higher ed to make Open Syllabus a framework for curricular comparison and educational research around the world. For countries where the display of curricular choices can put faculty at risk, OS will serve as a dark archive that curates–but does not display–curricular history.

Open Syllabus provides a view of higher education as a global project of transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next. It is also a tool for democratizing and defending the integrity of that project. Our syllabus use policies are an effort to pursue and, where necessary, balance both goals. We need help to realize them.

What can you do?​

We welcome personal donations by faculty and instructors. Syllabus donations are always welcome via share@opensyllabus.org. Syllabi are subject to the limited visibility rules above by default. If you put 'public' in the subject line of a submission, we will make them publicly available as our tools improve.

We need the support and participation of universities—especially in the form of access to university-held syllabus archives. If you are in a position to explore formal participation of your university,send us a note.

We welcome older syllabi. The collection is small before 2010 and inadequate for analysis before 2000. We would love to be able to expand the historical reach of the Explorer.