Stanford Online

STANFORD'S ONLINE LEARNING INITIATIVES

The vision of Stanford Online is to continue Stanford’s leadership in providing high-quality educational experiences to its students and to people around the world by unleashing creativity and innovation in online learning.

With that vision in mind, Stanford Online will undertake the following goals:

• Understand the fundamentals of teaching and learning in new contexts, both global and technological, in order to develop tools and practices to enhance the learning process.
• Study online learning through a series of creative and innovative experiments formulated by teaching faculty. These experiments may involve new uses of technology or new teaching models supported by technology.

• Develop new educational programs and new options within existing programs over time. For example, future offerings of online courses may allow Stanford undergraduates to take a wider range of courses while resident at overseas campus. Stanford may also develop hybrid or online certificate programs based on online courses.
• Explore ways to make new course material and learning experiences available to teaching programs at other colleges and universities.
• Provide public global access to selected learning experiences as a public service.

Stanford Online will support faculty innovation in teaching through three efforts:

Pedagogy:The pedagogy team will suggest new teaching and learning models to faculty. In addition, we will collect data from each course and facilitate educational research evaluating the success of experiments and formulating new approaches and methods.

Production:The production team will assist faculty in developing course content by providing equipment and services (including editing, training, etc.)

Platform:The platform team will provide a selection of delivery platforms, some provided by external organizations and some provided by on-campus operations. We will also provide software development support for software modules that encapsulate topic-specific material, such as simulations for student investigation of natural phenomena and auto-grading methods for specific types of learning exercises.