By Stanford Report staff

Responding to a university-wide call for proposals last month, more than 40 individual faculty and small teams outlined plans for innovation in online learning, and around half from the schools of Humanities and Sciences, Education, Medicine and Engineering will receive full or partial funding.

The proposals for the coming academic year cover a wide range of topics including gender in science, solar cells, head and neck anatomy, public health and organizational analysis. The faculty will use the grants not only to experiment with new models of teaching but also to conduct research to determine what works best for them.

"These exciting proposals from across the university show that many members of the faculty are interested in trying new teaching methods and using technology to improve their classes," said John Mitchell, the Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in the School of Engineering and President John Hennessy's special assistant for educational technology. "It's been a grassroots phenomenon, which really reflects Stanford's tradition of innovation and creativity."

Those leading the online education initiative on campus stress that the multiple proposals emanating from the faculty, and the varied technological solutions being put forward to accommodate them, show how broad and multifaceted online education can be.

"The level of interest from the faculty has been building steadily," Mitchell said. "There is nothing top-down about this. In line with Stanford's longtime experience in experimentation, there is something of a start-up mood all across campus. And many faculty members really want to get their message out to potential students around the world."

University leaders also emphasize that though enormous technological and social transformations may revolutionize the higher education model that has been in place for centuries, the quality of a Stanford education and Stanford's ultimate mission will remain unchanged. The point is to improve learning on campus and expand access to a Stanford education beyond the Farm, they say.

Clearly there is widespread interest among the faculty in developing either entirely new courses or supplementing existing courses with online content. Most of the seed-grant applicants aim for a blended experience; they want to experiment with flipped classrooms where lectures are delivered online by adding videos and cool tools but personal contact is retained and augmented by working on problems together. They are not necessarily interested, at least not yet, in the massive open online courses (MOOCs) that have garnered so much publicity.

"Stanford can leverage the social aspect of these courses," Mitchell said. "Students really know how to use social networking platforms to spread new ideas and think collectively, so bringing this dimension into learning, and combining it with face-to-face interaction, can generate a lot of excitement."

Mitchell also leads the Presidential Advisory Committee on Technology in Higher Education, a body convened in February to provide guidance to the university. In particular, it is examining policy issues, content production and content delivery. Its report will be issued later this summer.

Excerpt from:
Stanford faculty is embracing online teaching opportunities