Towards a syllabus repository for computer science courses

Abstract

A syllabus defines the contents of a course, as well as other information such as resources and assignments. In this paper, we report on our work towards creating a syllabus repository of Computer Science courses across universities in the USA. We present some statistics from our initial collection of 8000+ syllabi. We show a syllabus creator that is integrated with Moodle [5], an opensource course management system, which allows for the creation of a syllabus for a particular course. Among other information, it includes knowledge units from the Computing Curricula 2001 body of knowledge. The goal of the syllabus repository is to provide added value to the Computer Science Education community, and we present some such offerings. We conclude by presenting our future plans for the syllabus repository. These include using automated techniques to collect and classify syllabi, providing recommendations to instructors when creating a syllabus, and allowing the community to share their syllabi automatically. The syllabus collection will be part of the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (CITIDEL), a collection of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL).

What Do CS1 Syllabi Reveal About Our Expectations of Introductory Programming Students?

“…The studies mentioned above involve investigating what is taught in CS1, commonly involving constructing CS1 concept lists, and often with an extra dimension such as the difficulty students have with the concepts. Also related to the present work at a different angle is the CITIDEL (Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library) Syllabus Collection [27], now a part of Ensemble [10]. This work aimed to provide a syllabus information tool to the computer science education community, which is also an aim of the present work.…”

The Canterbury QuestionBank

“…Classification was fairly accurate; information extraction was more challenging. Tungare et al [34] proposed to build on this work, using a large collection of computing course syllabi, gathered for inclusion in CITIDEL. While an interesting challenge for machine learning, and somewhat feasible for assignments or syllabi, this is not likely a promising approach for short MCQs.…”

Negotiating the web science curriculum through shared educational artefacts

“…For example, the Computer Science community established a repository of existing syllabi 3 (CITIDEL) that enables designers of new courses to understand how others have approached the problem [20].The Information Science community is using a wiki 4 [4] to enable the whole community to contribute to the dynamic development of the curriculum. What makes the WSCD project unique is that rather than taking a top down structured approach to curriculum definition it takes a bottom up approach, using the actual teaching materials as the basis on which to iteratively negotiate and refine the definition of the curriculum.…”