Announcing The CUNY Syllabus Project
THE CUNY SYLLABUS PROJECT
(https://syllabus.commons.gc.cuny.edu)
Greetings!
We are excited to introduce a new collaborative database for the CUNY pedagogical community aimed at exploring the learning pathways that educators at the CUNY campuses create through their syllabi. The CUNY Syllabus Project plans to collect, analyze, and visualize syllabi across campuses, disciplines, and departments at CUNY.
We’re focusing on CUNY because we believe that, as the largest public urban university system in the country, CUNY is both unique and vast enough to warrant a syllabus analysis project of its own that is specific to its situation. As of 2014, CUNY’s total enrollment (both part time and full time students) was nearly 250,000 students, over 70% of which were students of color. Teaching those students are 18,573 full and part-time faculty. Understanding the depth and breadth of what’s happening at CUNY is a worthwhile task.
We also think that inviting submissions from CUNY educators – rather than scraping the web for syllabi – will lay the groundwork for a robust community of educators that have an interest in analyzing CUNY’s pedagogical history and building upon its pedagogical future.
A database allowing members to upload and search syllabi by topic, text or author would enable teachers in the CUNY system and beyond to build on one another’s work while reflecting upon pedagogical trends within and across disciplines. It would also create a lasting archive of CUNY instructional materials and an institutional history of teaching and learning at the university.
To build our database, we need your help!
We invite contributions of syllabi from courses taught throughout CUNY from any department or discipline, any course level or topic, at any time in CUNY’s history. The more submissions we receive the more dynamic our database will become, and the more significant and meaningful data we will be able to share with the CUNY community. The goal of the CUNY Syllabus Project is to empower teachers to be able to be more creative and innovative with their pathway building. Please contribute for a chance to make a lasting impression on the pedagogical future of CUNY!
