Common Syllabi - sharing and archiving university courses

Pierre Depaz

Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad

Problem Statement: There is very little transparence and shared, open infrastructure to courses taught in various universities. More and more socio-economic issues rely on global cooperation and knowledge transfer, and while there is push in open infrastructure for research, there is still a lack in its educational counterpart. As educators are driven to diversify their syllabi, to lean in to interdisciplinarity (ethics in computer science, engineering in the arts, etc.), and to include global problems across disciplines (such as the climate crisis or social justice), there is no place to share such individual, and yet global endeavours. The Common Syllabi is an answer to these issues, by providing an open-source platform where educators do not have to rely on their home institutions' technological stacks and administrative whims in order to contribute to a more sustainable teaching ecosystem at the university level.

Proposed Activities: We plan to develop our activities in terms of capacity building at both the content and community level, by gathering and creating thematic collections of syllabi, and developping our outreach beyond north america and europe. We intend to along three axes of current issues: climate change, ethics in technology, diversity and inclusion. All of these topics are both cross-disciplinary and relatively recent, meaning that these are the ones that educators would benefit the most in browsing and sharing, in order to incorporate them in their own courses. While such collections already exist a through ad hoc and disconnected initiative, we intend to gather them on a single platform in order to display the cross-disciplinary value of diverse teaching approaches. We will take this opportunity to reach out in particular to educators affiliated with Global South universities (in particular, we have contacts with educators in Argentina, in Papua New-Guinea and Ghana). We hope that this cross-continental approach will extend our community by providing a different outlook on both content and pedagogy of university courses taught across the world.

Openness: Our work is open on both a technical and legal perspective: the platform itself is open source, and presents documentation in order to get started by independent organizations to have a lightweight solution to organize and share their teaching resources. Second, the shared resources are all published under a creative commons license allowing re-use and re-teach for all.

Challenges: The biggest challenge is that the sharing courses and teaching materials at the university level is not a part of the culture of academic staff (contrary to sharing research). Thus, we have encountered the issue of howing to change individuals' perspectives by demonstrating the need for open infrastructure, rather than simply providing an open infrastructure to existing, closed alternatives.

Neglectedness: There are several funding opportunities supporting open-access and open-education. We have applied to and received two grants previously. The Prototype Fund, from the German Ministry of Education, has provided us with the means of finishing the technical development of the platform. The Digital Humanities grant from Paris-3 has allowed us to seed the platform with course materials by digitalizing existing syllabi, as well as streamlining the input process for educators with less technical background. We hope that the IOI funding will allow us to further build our capacity in terms of diverse content on the platform, supporting a cultural shift and providing a starting point for other independent instances based on the same technical infrastructure (interoperability).

Success: We measure the success of this work along three metrics. First, at least 100 full-fledged course plans and materials in each of the three proposed collections. Second, at least 50% of all syllabi should be coming from universities in the Global South, or from educators in the Global South. Finally, we aim to see an increase in our visitor traffic from South America, Oceania and Africa of a combined 25% of the total traffic (currently 5%).

Total Budget: USD11,275.00

Affiliations: We are an independent project, which we value. While some of our partners include educators affiliated with institutions (NYU, Paris-3, Sciences Po), we nonetheless strive to remain independent from a single educational institution.

LMIE Carveout: Our project does not fit immediately within these categories. However, we aim to contribute to more knowledge exchange from Higher Income Economies towards LMIE, and as such are actively aiming to

Team Skills: Our team is composed of lecturers and adjunct faculty at US, German and French universities. As such, we do have an existing network of colleagues at the global level through whom we intend to reach out to develop the content of the Common Syllabi infrastructure. Specifically, some of us are affiliated with the NYU Global campus: these global campuses, such as those in Buenos Aires and Accra, employ educators who also work for local educational institutions. It is through these kinds of personal contact that we aim to strenghten our capacity by jointly demonstrating the need and benefits of shared open infrastructure for higher education syllabi, and introduce the infrastructure project to educators beyond the northern hemisphere.

How Did You Hear About This Call: Word of mouth (e.g. conversations and emails from IOI staff, friends, colleagues, etc.) / Boca a boca (por ejemplo, conversaciones y correos electrónicos del personal del IOI, amigos, colegas, etc.)

Submission Number: 23