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Does anyone else see a wonderful watchdog project for formally/publicly identifying inept instructors and professors coming out of this?Or is that just foolish optimism on my part?
Why would it be more effective than peer and student review? I'm not saying that those are effective systems on their own (the bigger argument is whether academia is interested in "watchdog" regulation of instructional quality, which I would argue, "No")...but I don't think too many people are going to be enthusiastic about "ineptness" being quantified by what's found on a syllabus.

It'd be like writing a tool that evaluated developers based on what languages or libraries they used, as found on their Github repos.

I'm sure we can come up with some more interesting uses!
A bad instructor can have a fantastic syllabus.
I don't think there's an API and the explorer function is rather limited (so as not to expose "private" sullabi).

Here's an example question this project can help answering: Do non elite schools incorporate new, or non-mainstream, material quicker than elite schools?

Question data can help answer: Are similar courses taught in two (or more) disciplines?
Find items that begin life in the syllabi of one discipline and migrate to a different discipline.