The article in question discusses the value of the course content that has been predefined by millions of colleges across the country to teach us and the value that the education in question brings into our lives. The author of the article begins to describe syllabus material as the best efforts that the faculty members make in order to map out the best course of action to follow for and the objectives to be accomplished in a very limited time. Moving a step further, he discusses the archiving of this course planning material. The author’s effort was to collect and consolidate all of this syllabus material from different university website in one place so that the partners could study them and understand the modern methods of teaching and publishing this course content. This information also allows us all to observe how often a course material is put into practice.
The reason for this is that the material that is chosen as course content is judged on a very different basis from one that is applied when judging the quality of any particular piece of writing. So if a faculty member chooses an article which is easy to adapt as course material and which is suited to the subject matter that is to be applied, that high ranking for that course material can be useful only for judging what material is suitable for teaching and for no other purpose. We can see that very clearly knowing that many universities only publish material that is not subject to complex privacy and copyrights, and this on many levels leads to reduced quality of the material.
I personally agree with the claims that the author lays down in this respect. Meaning the Open Syllabus Project is not the best way to determine how any piece of work could be efficient or inefficient. This is because, under this particular strategy, newly written work would always have to pass through the scrutiny by more than a few people just to make it to the list of syllabus material that should be ranked according to the given system. In this respect, the author suggests a more open approach to adopting the desirable course content for a good reason. This is not a half bad idea to consider it honestly. Because it is not hard to see that this strategy of ranking the syllabus material is giving more important to content that has already acknowledged as suitable course material and material that has not noticeable rank remains underrated.
In support of all of this evidence, the author presents very convincing claims. According to him, some of the metrics for ranking this course material could be subject to controversy for it may cover a very narrow range of the academic’s efforts. So by choosing this well-known content, the students that have to go through these materials may miss many dimensions of
research and may be deprived of the understanding of many different concepts and ideal so with this reason, the author has been successful in explaining the stance that he has taken on the given situation. In addition to this, the author explains that a successful academy would mostly be the one which adopts a multiple ranges of methods of evaluation of the course content, a reason that very frankly appeals to our sense of reason.
So the bottom line is that a collection of much-aggregated course content is ranked based on a different basis and is selected free of any concerns regarding the complexity of the legal issues that relate to any particular piece of writing. Our education system can only be as good as the quality of the material that is applied in class; this is why the issue if important.
List of References
KARAGANIS, D. M. (2016, January 22). What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us. Retrieved from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/what-a-million-syllabuses-can-teach-us.html?_r=1
