The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) is an online open-source platform that catalogs and analyzes millions of college syllabi.

[3] Founded by researchers from the American Assembly at Columbia University, the OSP has amassed the most extensive collection of searchable syllabi.

Since its beta launch in 2016, the OSP has collected over 7 million course syllabi from over 80 countries, primarily by scraping publicly accessible university websites.

The OSP was formed by a group of data scientists, sociologists, and digital-humanities researchers at the American Assembly, a public-policy institute based at Columbia University.

[17] The OSP classifies the syllabi into 62 subject fields – corresponding to the U.S. Department of Education's Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP).

[33] The most assigned texts in the field of philosophy include Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, and Plato's Republic.

[36] Data from the OSP indicates that the dominant political science texts are written almost exclusively by white men and scholars based in the West.

[39] According to William Germano et al., the OSP is a "fascinating resource but is also prone to misrepresenting or at least distracting us from the most important business of a syllabus: communicating with students.

"[41] English professor Bart Beaty writes that, "Despite the many reservations about the completeness of its data, the OSP provides a rare opportunity for scholars to move beyond the anecdotal in discussions of canon-formation in teaching.

"[42] Media theorist Elizabeth Losh opines that "big data approaches", like the OSP, may "raise troubling questions for instructors about informed consent, pedagogical privacy, and quantified metrics.