There's Smithy, which tries to help design API operations around a resource in a CRUDL-like fashion - I think that's what you're getting at? https://awslabs.github.io/smithy/
There's also SOGo (https://www.sogo.nu/), which I'd be interested to see how Grommunio stacks up against that. SOGo has been pretty reliable for my personal deployments.
I also took News Literacy at Stony Brook in 2013. I think that was one of the more popular classes for students by then, especially since it allowed students to choose which gen ed humanities requirement (out of two) to satisfy that was otherwise a bit tedious to get.
Most people I know who went into the course just for credits came out with a greater appreciation for the course in general.