The provost has asked professors to start uploading course syllabi onto courses.brown.edu, according to a Brown Daily Herald report last week. This announcement is in response to a recommendation from UCS as well as a column in The Herald earlier this semester.

This simple step will make the course selection process far easier for students. As the student columnist explains, shopping period can be a chaotic, time-absorbing process: students cram into a classroom, hear a professor read through the syllabus, at which point said professor usually refrains from delving into his or her first lecture, knowing that many students there have yet to commit to the class, thereby defeating the whole purpose of shopping in the first place. Some students overload their schedules for the first week or two with classes to shop, either exhausting themselves trying to keep up with all the course work, or falling behind because they can’t. Putting course syllabi online streamlines this process, allowing students to narrow the number of courses they will actually be shopping at the start of the semester, making better use of everyone’s time.

A further advantage is that this increases curricular transparency to those outside of the Brown campus. One of our contentions  is that the curriculum is weighed too heavily toward courses that “pay special attention” to issues of race, ethnicity, gender. Meanwhile, traditional great books courses seem to be few and far between. Now, with all course syllabi online, we will be able to see just how biased or balanced the open curriculum really is.

This Brown Daily Herald column probes one of the conundrums of the open curriculum: Why is it that with all the freedom students are given, many don’t end up getting to take what they really want? Here is his diagnosis of the problem:

During freshman year, and to a slightly lesser extent sophomore year, there’s nothing really substantial to guide our course selections. We come to Brown with some interests, we use those interests to focus our course selections and, more often than not, we end up abandoning those interests, at least in part. ….

Because we don’t really have a firm focus in the beginning, we’re kind of blindly shooting bullets at department buildings and hoping to hit something worthwhile. The average student takes courses in a bunch of areas that he thinks he will enjoy, and gradually narrows down his interests until he finds something in which he wants to concentrate. While this method is certainly effective, it severely cuts away at the number of elective courses we have to use in our later years.

Put another way, one of the weaknesses of the open curriculum is that students are not always given the guidance and structure they need to make wise choices.  This is especially the case for those students who choose to use their freedom to pursue a course of study along the lines of the traditional core curriculum.

The student writer comes up with a somewhat creative solution: allow undergraduates to apply for a fifth, tuition-free year during which they can take courses outside of their concentration. Unfortunately, given Brown’s budget deficit, this isn’t terribly too practical. But we certainly hope students, faculty, and administrators explore other ways to build more structure into the open curriculum.