Impacts and progress

Academic Innovation for the Public Good book series

Overview

Academic Innovation for the Public Good, a collaboration with Trinity College, is a series of author conversations held on Zoom that explore how to make higher education more equitable, accessible, and meaningful. Participating authors are interviewed by experts in their fields. The events are free and open to all. The series is supported by seven program partners and by 15 co-sponsors, all colleges and universities. Our goals with the conversation series are to foster discussion about higher education's obligations and potential to advance the public good; to give authors of new books about academic innovation a platform to share their work; and to offer a rich online community space where attendees can interact and explore series themes.

Launch date: The first year of the series launched in January 2022 with 10 author events; the 2023 series included eight author events, with the series divided into two parts focused on belonging and knowledge sharing; and 2024 featured four author events, with two looking to the future of higher education, one examining a fraught past, and one focused on strategies for reducing digital misinformation.  Partners: Trinity College (co-organizer); more than 20 partnering and co-sponsoring colleges and universities. Project status: Underway. Strategic pillar: Catalyzing innovation.

Impact

We held 10 online author conversations in 2022, eight in 2023, and four in 2024, with an average attendance of 125. 

Code in Place at community colleges

Overview

We are collaborating with the Stanford University Computer Science Department and Foothill College, a community college in Los Altos Hills, Calif., to offer a version of Stanford’s acclaimed Code in Place (CiP) program directly to Foothill students, for credit. The college first provided the course in spring 2024 and is giving it again in fall 2024. Stanford Digital Education supported Code in Place faculty — Chris Piech, assistant professor of computer science, and colleagues — as they worked with Foothill instructors to integrate CiP programming into an introductory CS course at Foothill, CS 49: Foundations for Computer Programming. The team has leveraged the CiP platform to weave activities, lectures, and discussions into the existing CS 49 curriculum, providing a robust and engaging learning environment for students. Furthermore, five Foothill computer science students have served as section leaders in both the spring and fall, meeting with students weekly to deliver concepts, lead discussions, and answer questions. The section leaders were trained by CiP staff on pedagogical and platform best practices, and met with the team weekly to check in on student progress. 

Foothill instructor Lane Johnson has acted as primary instructor of record and has overseen the section leaders and students week to week. Code in Place staff member Miranda Li has played a critical role in carrying out curriculum integration, platform troubleshooting, and section leader training. Stanford Digital Education has provided project management support and has acted as liaison between all parties.

In fall 2024, Stanford Digital Education, Stanford Computer Science, and Foothill College added a Canvas learning management system integration to the course, with the goal of expanding the offering to community colleges across California in the near future. 

The effort is building upon CiP’s tremendous success since its launch in 2020 as a free digital course, reaching more than 30,000 students around the world. (For additional background, read this story about Code in Place on the Stanford School of Engineering website.)

Dual enrollment courses for high school students

Overview

We work with the National Education Equity Lab to offer Stanford courses nationwide to students in Title I high schools. Students earn both Stanford and high school credits. Stanford courses with the Ed Equity Lab provide a high-touch learning experience to students, with a remote Stanford teaching assistant for every participating high school. To develop these courses, we collaborate with high school teachers, leveraging their classroom expertise to shape Stanford course content for a high school student audience. Our goals are to introduce students in Title I high schools to Stanford coursework and the Stanford community, to give them college credit, to build confidence in college readiness, and to increase interest in applying to Stanford or other universities that may have seemed out of reach. For more detail, please see “Stanford courses for Title I high school students” on our website.

Launch date: September 2021. Partners: National Education Equity Lab. Project status: Underway. Strategic pillars: Education outreach, catalyzing innovation.

Impact

From our launch in fall 2021 through spring 2024, 1,540 high school students enrolled in Stanford courses at 71 schools in 17 states, plus Washington, D.C.

Support for student initiatives

Overview/objectives

Stanford Digital Education aims to provide forums and material support for certain projects that elicit Stanford students’ creativity and initiative. We are pleased to have sponsored in spring 2023 a student art exhibit, which was hosted in our building at 408 Panama. Later that year, we collaborated with the Stanford Haas Center for Public Service to help expand the university's work with Matriculate, a nonprofit that enables Stanford students to mentor low-income high school students. (Matriculate is on hiatus in 2024-25 as organizers lay the groundwork for a new iteration.) We are currently working with Stanford Spokes, a student group that bikes cross-country over the summer, presenting hands-on workshops for youth along the way.

Launch date: Stanford Spokes was formed in 2018, and we began supporting their planning and fundraising in spring 2023. Partners: Stanford Spokes. Project status: Underway. Strategic pillar: Education outreach.

Impact

In summer 2023, the Spokes biked through 13 states, stopping in seven communities to offer workshops that ranged from “Building Bottle Rockets” to “How the Internet Works.” The 2024 Spokes team spent 75 days on the road this past summer, conducting learning festivals in 10 states and Washington, D.C. Read a Stanford Report article about the team, learn more about what they taught, and view their record of their travels on their blog and @stanfordspokes on Instagram.

Working Learners Initiative for Stanford's current and potential employees

Overview

Working learners are employed adults who do not have four-year college degrees. In January 2022, Stanford’s Office of Community Engagement formed a community of practice to discover how distributed efforts could be connected to meet the challenges of working learners at Stanford. Stanford Digital Education is part of the core leadership team for the Working Learners Initiative, alongside other units. The goal is to accelerate opportunity and mobility for our own employees, and then scale our efforts through regional and national partnerships. 

In January 2023, Stanford Digital Education, working closely with University Human Resources Learning and Development, launched Coursera for Stanford, a new learning program to support the educational and professional growth of Stanford staff. 

Launch date: January 2022. Partners: Stanford University Human Resources, Coursera. Project status: Underway. Strategic pillars: Education outreach, catalyzing innovation.

Grow with Google professional development for community college faculty

Overview

We have collaborated with Grow with Google and the Bay Area Community College Consortium to support a program that gives community college students the opportunity to develop skills in data analytics and receive an industry-recognized Google Certificate. In June 2023, we offered professional development to community college and California State University faculty to support the integration of the data analytics certificates into their coursework, partnering with Women in Data Science, the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Stanford Graduate School of Education, the Carpentries, and others. Our goals were to establish a professional learning community for participating faculty, provide them with techniques and strategies to support their learners, and establish a playbook of certificate implementation best practices that can be scaled to additional community colleges. Since then, the faculty have experimented with several avenues to offer the certificates: some are integrating the content into existing courses, while others are building out prospective courses which go through the traditional curriculum approval process at their institutions. The Stanford team continued to check in with these faculty throughout fall 2023 and synthesized their feedback and experiences into a playbook of best practices: Empowering Community Colleges: A Playbook for Integrating Google’s Data Analytics Certificate into Curriculum (published in spring 2024). The Stanford team plans to continue to support community college faculty integrating these certificates into their coursework, and also to help identify internship and entry-level job opportunities for graduates of the certificate program. Three of the program participants used the material in courses in fall 2023, and more are expected to follow in 2024.

Read a June 2024 article about the playbook and an October 2023 article about the collaboration.

Lifelong Learning on the Stanford website

Overview

The Lifelong Learning website project aims to highlight lifelong learning opportunities at Stanford and make it easier to find and sign up for them. We hope the site can contribute to building community, shared understanding, and a common frame of reference among the Stanford entities that provide lifelong learning. 

Launch date: Phase 1: December 2022; Phase 2: June 2024. Partner: University Communications. Project status: Complete. Strategic pillar: Education outreach.

Impact

From the site's launch in December 2022 through June 2024, it had 40K users from 192 countries. Visitors access it through the main Stanford Academics page, where it appears alongside undergraduate and graduate education.

Stanford Administrative Fellowship program

Overview

We collaborated with the College of San Mateo and other offices at Stanford, as well as the Pathways Network, to pilot an internship program for administrative associates — the Stanford Administrative Fellowship (StAF). Interns shadowed Stanford administrative staff to learn on-the-job skills while receiving course credit and mentoring from the College of San Mateo. Read a December 2023 article about the Stanford Administrative Fellowship Program.

Launch date: September 2023. Partners: College of San Mateo,  Pathways Network, the Stanford Administrative Champions (password required); Stanford’s Office of Community Engagement. Project status: Complete. Strategic pillars: Education outreach, catalyzing innovation.

Impact

Eight student fellows from the College of San Mateo completed paid administrative internships in seven “host” departments at Stanford. They worked an average of 10 hours a week for twelve weeks and developed software, presentation, and project management skills.

Stanford pandemic education report

Overview

Our pandemic education report, “Lessons from Teaching and Learning at Stanford During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” reflects our year-long effort to synthesize and clarify that collective experience. We hope the report serves as the foundation on which the Stanford community can design its future digital education strategy.  

Launch date: Launched October 2021; published October 2022. Partners: We interviewed 59 Stanford stakeholders, from deans and professors to students to support staff. Project status: Complete. Strategic pillar: Catalyzing innovation.

Impact

Our report provided a structured way to take stock of what we could learn from Stanford's response to the pandemic and to contribute to a national conversation about the effect of the pandemic on higher education. View the News page on our pandemic education report website to see articles on our report, as well as op eds and presentations from the report authors.