Towards a Standardized Representation of Syllabi to Facilitate Sharing and Personalization of Digital Library Content

A course offering is a collection of learning objects composed together based on a syllabus. Syllabi define the contents of the course, as well as other information such as resources and assignments. Currently, there is no standard format for representing syllabi that can facilitate automatic processing of syllabi contents for various applications. In this paper, we report on the current practices in creating and publishing syllabi and present the motivation for a standardized syllabus schema. We report on our experiences obtaining and identifying syllabi published online by various institutions, and extracting syllabus data from them using genetic algorithms and other machine learning techniques. Finally, we describe the tools needed for working with syllabus schema, and applications that will be made possible with the availability of syllabi in standardized formats.