Open syllabus: an essential tool to evidence the teaching impact of your research
Short summary of my white paper: Open Syllabus - a treasure-trove for research and teaching
[Note: Open Syllabus was officially launched in the Summer of 2019 as Open Syllabus Explorer. I first discussed this service in November 2019. You can still find the original blogpost here: Open Syllabus Explorer: evidencing research-based teaching?.]
This blogpost introduces my white paper - Open Syllabus: a treasure-trove for research and teaching - discussing the latest Open Syllabus service as of October 2024. You can explore this version for yourself here. My white paper discusses both Open Syllabus Analytics and Open Syllabus Galaxy. You can use the table of contents below to jump to specific sections of interest.
Table of contents
What is impact anyway?
The Oxford dictionary defines impact as “a marked effect or influence”. Research impact thus means that our research has affected or influenced something or someone. Unfortunately, this immediately throws up even more questions:
- Whom has it impacted, i.e., who is the target audience?
- How has it made an impact, i.e., what was its ultimate goal?
- Through what means has this impact occurred, i.e., what are the primary outlets?
- How do we know this impact has occurred, i.e., how can we measure it?
The answer to these four questions very much depends on the specific academic role we are looking at (See Table 1).
Table 1: How research impact differs by academic role
Teaching role - Open Syllabus comes to the rescue
As academics, we all have a tremendous impact on our students. Obviously, some of this impact will be unrelated to the research we do. However, in any good university, research feeds into the classroom and students benefit from research-informed teaching, allowing them to develop critical thinking skills.
As academics, we facilitate this directly through prescribing our own and other academics’ research as course readings. But in many cases, we will need to “translate” our research to make it more accessible for a student audience. We do so through publishing textbooks or articles in practitioner journals such as Harvard Business Review.
So, how do you know whether your research is used beyond your own classroom? You can find out if your research is cited in textbooks by using Google Books. To discover whether your publications (academic articles, textbooks or practitioner articles) are listed in teaching syllabi, Open Syllabus is an incredibly useful tool.
The verdict?
Most academics will use Open Syllabus to evidence the teaching impact of their own or someone else's research. The lead image of this post shows the use of Open Syllabus Galaxy for this purpose. Although this usage suffers from the usual limations of reducing a complex phenomenon to a single metric (see also: The individual annualised h-index: an ecologically rational heuristic?), Open Syllabus provides an illuminating insight into a previously obscured area of research impact.
However the Open Syllabus service can also be used for a wide variety of other searches. It allows for a fascinating insight into country differences in terms of journal and disciplinary coverage, as well as an analysis of trends in teaching topics over time. Its gender statistics can shed a light on the continued underrepresentation of female authors in different disciplines. However, it can also serve as an exploratory tool to investigate the coverage of a topic/concept of your choice in different disciplines and search for suitable textbooks for your course.
All in all, I highly recommend to have a look at my white paper Open Syllabus: a treasure-trove for research and teaching and Open Syllabus itself and see what it can do for you. Let me know if you find any other use cases not covered in my white paper.
In sum: measuring impact
It is almost impossible to measure research impact - in any of the three domains listed above - accurately and comprehensively by quantitative metrics alone. On the other hand, relying only on testimonials and a fully narrative approach to establishing research impact is unlikely to convince audiences either. So in evidencing impact – for instance when making a case for promotion – academics are advised to rely on a combination of metrics, qualitative evidence such as testimonials, and career narratives.
For a great summary of impact indicators, see this absolutely stellar 27-page taxonomy. It was created by Amanda Cooper and Samantha Shewchuk and presents an overview of more than 400 indicators for the Social Sciences and Humanities. The authors gathered these indicators from more than 100 research impact resources in more than 32 countries and sorted them into six categories: Scholarship, Capacity Building, Economy, Society and Culture, Practice, and Policy.
Related videos
Related blogposts
- How to evidence & improve research impact? [Crafting your career in academia series]
- How to do impactful research?
- Research impact 101 [white paper]
- How to make your case for impact with Publish or Perish
- Measuring the impact of academic research: Best practices and open questions
- Making your case for impact if you have few citations
- How to measure research impact: YouTube series
- How to improve your research impact: YouTube series
Copyright © 2024 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Wed 23 Oct 2024 15:31
Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.
