SYLLABI

 Course Catalogues (Part 2)

   Last year I wrote a piece about how the examination of descriptions of courses offered at universities, could be a useful way to determine what is being taught at them. I figured that the ones now offered might be quite different from the ones that once were, but I thought that finding and sifting through them would be rather difficult. That post can be read by clicking on the link above. 
   That post about "Course Catalogues" has attracted some attention. That is a surprise, but after reading it again, it is highly likely that the attraction was the mention of "Bird Courses," which are eagerly sought after, and not mentioned as such in "Course Catalogues".
   For those of you who now may have stumbled upon this post because of my mention of "Bird Courses," I will just say that there is nothing more offered about "Bird Courses."
  This post is about "Syllabi", as advertised, and to let you know that there is a way to "see" millions of them. Others had the idea that such documents would be a useful way to find out what was being offered, which is not the same thing as finding out what is actually being taught. Still, to find out what students are expected to read, what they have to write (or not) and whether they have to go to class and participate, would be one way to assess the university experience. And to find out, for example, if the place is a 'safe' or 'dangerous' one, intellectually speaking - to use criteria mentioned often these days. 
   If you are the rare reader who is interested in "Course Catalogues", not "Bird Courses," here is what you need to know to access a large number of them from over 6,000 universities. I will mention here that the actual syllabi are not offered, just the data they contain.

The Open Syllabus Project (OSP)
   Here is a description: 
The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) provides the first “big data” look at the primary activity of higher education: teaching.  It collects and analyzes millions of university syllabi to generate novel academic and public applications of the expertise embedded in these teaching choices.  This data has a wide range of uses in scholarly metrics, educational research, and the sociology of knowledge.  It supports the work of teachers, publishers, and librarians, and opens up new ways of connecting academic expertise to wider publics at a time when those connections are being attacked.  
   Here is the link to the "Open Syllabus". (There is also a Facebook page.)

   Before heading to the OSP, a look at the Wikipedia entry is useful. See, "Open Syllabus Project." Among the "Notable Findings" area you will see some examples of what people are looking for among the data. These days that includes not just information about the books and articles being used, but the colour or gender of the authors of them.

   For an article written when the OSP came out see: "What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us," By Joe Karaganis and David McClure, New York Times, Jan.22, 2016:
   "COLLEGE course syllabuses are curious documents. They represent the best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear. Some schools archive them, some don’t. Some syllabus archives are public, some aren’t. Some faculty members treat their syllabuses as trade secrets, others are happy to post them online. Despite the bureaucratization of higher education over the past few decades, syllabuses have escaped systematic treatment.
   Until now. Over the past two years, we and our partners at the Open Syllabus Project (based at the American Assembly at Columbia) have collected more than a million syllabuses from university websites. We have also begun to extract some of their key components — their metadata — starting with their dates, their schools, their fields of study and the texts that they assign…..
   Such data has many uses. For academics, for example, it offers a window onto something they generally know very little about: how widely their work is read."

   For an example of how the data are used, see this working paper and the brief summary offered:
   “Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues," John A. Shields, et al. Working Paper. July 10, 2025.
   “This essay shines a needed light on college classrooms by drawing on a unique database of college syllabi collected by the “Open Syllabus Project” (OSP). The OSP has amassed more than 27 million syllabi from around the world primarily by scraping them from university websites. They date as far back as 2008, though a majority are from the last ten years. Most of the data comes from universities in the United States, U.K., Canada, and Australia. And while the OSP doesn’t provide all of the raw data to scholars, it provides limited access via a searchable website and useful analytic tools to assess the data.”
   We used the OSP to explore how three contentious issues are being taught: racial bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion."
A copy of the 66pp pdf is available here.

Cancon:
   The syllabi of some Canadian universities are included. For the analytics relating to some of the syllabi at Western University, see here.
The Bonus:
   Princeton University Press has produced a book about this subject. Interestingly enough, it doesn't appear to be available at Western or many other Ontario university libraries. 
  Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything, William Germano & Kit Nicholls.
   "Generations of teachers have built their classes around the course syllabus, a semester-long contract that spells out what each class meeting will focus on (readings, problem sets, case studies, experiments), and what the student has to turn in by a given date. But what does that way of thinking about the syllabus leave out—about our teaching and, more importantly, about our students’ learning?"

Course Catalogues

   Early this morning I had the thought that comparing university course catalogues from various periods would be interesting. My assumption is that a syllabus from, say the "radical sixties" for courses offered from, for example, a Political Science Department, would be less radical and even less 'scientific', than one from this year. It remains unproven.

  I recalled that a few years ago a researcher from a major university in the U.S. showed up at the University of Western Ontario  and wished to be shown UWO catalogues from the 1920s. He was trying to find out if the Business School at Western was one of the first to introduce the "case method" into the classroom. Some were located in storage and I think some have even been digitized. My search now for some of them remains unfinished.
  Too much effort would be required and my assumption remains just a hunch. I wasn't easily able to find the ones on the campus close by and the search for others would be even more effortful. Plus, such searches can quickly go astray. Which is what happened, but what I did find may be of interest.

"BIRD" Courses
   Such courses are not ones the researchers associated with Western's Advanced Facility for Avian Research would be looking for (for more about AFAR see, "For The Birds".) "Bird" courses are easy ones and, like most things, they are easily found by searching (see below.) 
   The website from which the image above was taken is as sophisticated as the image is attractive and the caption says, "use this beautiful resource to help you find out more about fun courses at Western." Additional topics are offered, such as a "Guide to Navigating University," "Medical School Application Guide" and information about various STEM courses.
  The website is called "WebStraw",
"which is a a student run not-for-profit that tries to make learning in the post secondary environment the best it can be. We are an organization that has immense expertise in the field of learning strategies, module design and open-access educational advocacy, and we use these skills to create projects and products that greatly improve the educational environment in universities all over North America."  Some of those involved seem to be here in London, but there is also information about McMaster and Queen's. For more, see webstraw.ca. [see "Sources" below.]
  

Back to the "Birds"
   The Catalogue of "Bird" Courses at Western University" was done in 2021 and is found in the form of a 31 page pdf. Samples of some of the courses are provided above and they include more detail and and there are more of them. The purpose of the catalogue is: 
"to provide you with insight into courses that will enhance your academic experience at Western. These courses, commonly referred to as “Birds”, are highly recommended by other students because they are structured in a manner that guarantees your academic success. Furthermore, these courses are often taken as electives to help lighten your overall workload, as content is easily digestible and evaluations are straightforward. In simple terms, we define a “Bird” as the following: Bird: A course that, by design, enables students to succeed with content that is easy to grasp, requires minimal effort relative to other university courses, and has fair evaluations."
I will not provide the link to the pdf here, but it will be easy to find. 
   My purpose in this post is less clear, but it certainly is not to promote "bird" courses. Apart from the very interesting and professional "WebStraw" endeavour, I also find it interesting that there might not be much known about it at Western. A search of the Western website, the library one and the Western Gazette yielded nothing.

Sources: 
  The website for "WebStraw" was provided and is safe. I did not provide a link to the pdf. [ A reader let me know the link provided above does not work. That is correct and I am unable to provide a stable one. It can be found, however, by googling "Webstraw" which leads to https://webstraw.ca., a site under construction. Under "Western Resources" I was able to find the "Bird Course Catalogue." You should find it there, but if not, do the search. Also try: https://webstraw-bird-course-catalogue.super.site/ (this was found via: https://linktr.ee/WebStraw. "Webstraw" appears to be a website builder.] July 7, 2024.

   The etymology of "bird" in this context seems to have some Canadian roots - e.g. "A university or high school course regarded as requiring little work or intellectual ability. Perhaps with reference to the size of a bird’s brain, suggesting that students of such courses have limited academic ability (cf. bird-brained adj.).OED, 1975.
  A search for "bird courses" will find many, but is not recommended. For more about one of them see: "Site Tempts Birdbrains With Easy University Courses," Kamila Hinkson, Toronto Star, August 16, 2013.