Faculty Seed Grants

What are faculty seed grants?

Each quarter, the Office of the Vice Provost for Online Learning offers funds to support design and development of innovative online and blended courses. The goals of these grants are to 1) promote innovative blended and online teaching approaches; 2) to assess the effectiveness of these new teaching strategies; and 3) to gauge faculty interest in developing these courses. We encourage interested faculty to read the call for proposals and submit their proposals at least one quarter prior to the quarter in which they will offer the course.

The Office of the Vice Provost for Online Learning (VPOL) invites proposals to develop innovative online and blended courses. The VPOL encourages proposals that challenge our understanding of what's possible in online learning, leveraging innovative technologies and teaching strategies to promote deep learning experiences for learners at Stanford and beyond. Projects should have significant impact, reaching Stanford students and/or learners across the globe, and informing a scholarly understanding of effective practices in online learning.

The School of Engineering and School of Medicine are continuing to offer matching funds for successful projects by  faculty in their schools. Please review the relevant sections in the associated Faculty Seed Grants Information document [PDF] for additional information. For this round of seed grants, and in collaboration with the Office of International Affairs, there is additional funding for online learning projects that involve a global learning component. Please review the “International Online Learning” section in the Faculty Seed Grants Information document [PDF] for more information. Note: Proposals for the Spring 2013 are not required to have an international component. However, projects that include international education may be eligible for matching funds.

Winter 2013

Fall 2012

Fourteen individual faculty and small teams from the schools of humanities and sciences, education, medicine and engineering received full or partial funding:

Maya Adam (Humanities and Sciences)
Sallie DeGolia & Terrence Ketter (Medicine)
Larry Diamond (Humanities and Sciences)
Dolores Gallagher-Thompson (Medicine)
Michael Genesereth (Engineering)
Noah Goodman (Humanities and Sciences)
Bert Hesselink (Engineering)
Rafe Mazzeo (Humanities and Sciences)
Helen Paris (Humanities and Sciences)
Candace Pau (Medicine)
Allison Okamura & Paulo Blikstein (Engineering & Education)
Alberto Salleo (Engineering)
Robert Siegel (Humanities and Sciences)
Jennifer Widom (Engineering)

Summer 2012

Seventeen individual faculty and small teams from the schools of humanities and sciences, education, medicine and engineering received full or partial funding last summer in the first round of seed grants from Stanford Online. Grants were awarded in part based on three criteria: is the proposal offering something new? does it include an assessment procedure? and what sort of impact will it have?

Here are brief descriptions of the projects that were funded:

1. Dan McFarland (School of Education), “Organizational Analysis.” Fall 2012. In this introductory course, students learn multiple theories of organizational behavior and apply them to actual cases of organizational change. The blended learning version of the class affords students the chance to view lectures on-line, allows faculty and TA's to learn about student questions / challenges ahead of time (on the forum), and then focus class-time on discussion, collaborative exercises and student directed projects.

The project goal is to develop improved forms of peer evaluation and forum discussions to render online education more salient to the humanities and social sciences. Many of those courses request students to write papers and relate complex arguments in discussions. Peer evaluation systems, augmented by experts and natural language processing, may be a means to scaling up assessments of written material and potentially improving them. Analyses of the conversation features in forums and relating them to posting evaluations may also inform us on how these contexts can nurture productive discussions more on par with face-to-face seminars. 

2. Dan Schwartz (School of Education), “Inductive Learning.” 2013 - 2014. This pilot will be conducted in the context of Dr. Schwartz’s Topics in Cognition and Learning course taught every fall. This course includes readings on how humans learn from data, the problem of induction, and why statistics is important in this context and will be an excellent research and development environment.

Year One
Course conducted in brick and mortar fashion, to allow development of the inductive tasks and to collect a number of student products so we can create the lectures that will be “canned” for videotaping. Experiment with all the online technologies (including our own) to determine optimal features for this course.

Depending on funding and time, may bring other learning technologies into the online learning space (e.g., “improved” clicker system that can work synchronously or asynchronously and that helps students and teachers establish expectations and come to a joint understanding of what is most important to learn.)

Year Two
Teach EDUC 250B as either a blended or fully on-line course with further task and technology testing and more videoing of live class lectures.

3. Donald Barr (Human Biology and School of Medicine), “Human Behavior.” This project will develop a series of web-based teaching modules that will present current
knowledge and understanding of human behavior as seen from multiple perspectives. These
modules will then be blended with a series of in-class, group based exercises to facilitate
students’ understanding of human behavior as reflecting a range of overlapping determinants.

4. Daniel Edelstein (French/Italian) and Deborah Gordon (Biology). “Networks.” Spring 2013. The challenge for teaching network theory is how to make complicated concepts accessible to students. The project team will develop simple tools for real-time visualizations of networks that support basic manipulation and filtering tools. This project-based approach, in which data collected by students are represented as network visualizations, will allow students to engage in meaningful assignments that fully replicate the research process and will develop analytical skills. The faculty team will also produce interactive pedagogical animations with inline interactive quizzes and activities

5. Erik Flatmo Gambatese (Design, Theatre & Performance Studies [formerly Drama]), “Virtual Drafting for the Online World.” Fall 2013. This course in “virtual drafting” will feature drawings that are never produced on paper but are instead created for online viewing. Posting drawings online allows malleability that does not exist easily in the paper world. Students can update, change and collaborate on drawings in ways that are entirely new. This is an entirely original approach to teaching drafting.

Students publish digitally created drawings to a website dedicated to the class. Then, as guided by the instructor, students view, download, alter and re-upload drawings created by other students.

An online forum on the website is available to students for trading drafting tips and suggestions. Each week the instructor picks one question or problem posed by a student in the forum and creates an instructional video viewable through the website. Computer-aided drafting (CAD, Autocad) software fundamentals are taught in addition to basic drafting conventions such as orthographic projection, basic architectural views, composite drawings and axonometric renderings. Students are encouraged to think about drawing as a digital and online (not paper-based) creation. Creativity and originality are prized in the way that the drawings are created and interactively displayed.

6. Londa Schiebinger (History), “Gender in Science, Medicine and Engineering.” Winter 2013, modules of a regular Stanford course. The project goals are to develop HISTORY 144: “Gender in Science, Medicine, and Engineering” as a large lecture course and simultaneously as a “blended”/“flipped” course with a series of fifteen- minute online lectures (approximate 15-18). The course will be offered through History, and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS). I worked over the course of last year with Fred Turner, STS Director, to make this course part of the program’s new core curriculum in the Cultural and Historical Perspectives track.

7. Anne Friedlander (Human Biology, in conjunction with Stanford Storytelling Project. “Storytelling in the Sciences.” Spring 2013. The overall goal of this pilot project is to design a scalable method of teaching digital communication
skills to scientists while simultaneously building a student generated on-line learning tool. The first phase of this
project will take place in the fall of 2012 using Dr. Friedlander’s Exercise Physiology class. The project will contain the following objectives: 

• Faculty and project staff will create on-line modules over the summer to teach digital storytelling skills to students in the sciences.
• After being instructed by the modules, students will produce a brief video learning tool as their final project for the fall class. The successful, vetted projects will then be used to instruct students in the class the following year. Over time, the projects will form an extensive on-line searchable resource library in Exercise Science that will be updated and expanded in future years.

8. Bruce Clemens (Physics), “Solar Cells, Fuel Cells, Batteries” (MSE 156/256). Fall 2012, hosted on Class2Go. This flipped-model course focuses on the operating principles and applications of emerging technological solutions to the energy demands of the world. It covers the scale of global energy usage and requirements for possible solutions, basic physics and chemistry of solar cells, fuel cells, and batteries as well as explores performance issues, including economics, from the ideal device to the installed system and ends with the promise of materials research for providing next generation solutions.

9. Chaitan Khosla (Chemical Engineering) "E20, Introduction to Chemical Engineering." Spring - Summer 2013. The goals of this project are to further develop materials for E20 (Introduction to Chemical Engineering) with the goal of developing a fundamentally new pre-major course that is built around the 14 Grand Challenges In Engineering that were released by the National Academy of Engineering in 2008. The focus will be on creating an online multi-media text for the course and record the in-class discussions so they can be embedded into the online course.

10. Ingmar Riedel-Kruse (Bioengineering), “Large-scale remote biology experimentation.” Winter 2013. This course explores new avenues in online education with goals to establish the technological feasibility of remote biology experimentation labs for undergraduate and graduate education, to demonstrate that this technology is scalable in the future from a cost perspective, to show that there is a positive learning effect on the student using this remote technology, and to collect evidence that remote experiments have stand-out features compared to virtual online lab experiments.

11. Jill Helms (School of Medicine), “Hippocrates Challenge.” Fall 2013. This online course is designed to introduce undergraduate-level students via massively multiuser online role-playing to the field of “regenerative medicine”, which is predicated on the biology of stem cells and the inherent ability of the body to repair itself.

Students begin as medics, charged with performing the task of triage (learning observation and diagnosis) and managing superficial injuries (learning anatomy) of the injured crew. As the student’s character masters these subjects and begins to integrate material (anatomy + biology = physiology) they will be confronted with progressively more complex reconstructive dilemmas and will advance to higher character levels (resident, chief surgeon) with increasingly demanding restorative challenges.

12. Andrew Patterson (School of Medicine), “Cardiac physiology.” Spring 2013. Stanford University School of Medicine faculty will collaborate with the Khan Academy to offer a blended version of this on-campus course for Stanford medical students (Human Health and Disease sequence, INDE 221). Stanford faculty will record videos that will also be used to teach in a partnership with the Gitwe Hospital and School in Rwanda.

13. Homero Rivas (School of Medicine). “Mobile Health Without Borders.” Winter 2013. The course will be open to the world with all lectures streamed live and available in a hybrid seminar/webinar where a cohort of Stanford students attends weekly lectures on-site where they can meet and interact with mobile health leaders, including the speakers and the class participants from around the world. Participation and interaction is facilitated via dynamic class discussion and Q&A. with questions for each lecturer selected from a live twitter and video feed through which participants from around the world pose their questions and comments.

1. Any enrollee of the class can post a lecture video on a topic, which can be viewed, rated, commented upon, and promoted by any other class member. 2. Topic and speaker selection for the lectures will be 50% set by the course directors and 50% determined through a vote by the enrollees that will take place during the first
and second week of the course.

The course functions much like a conference on mobile health, but it takes place over the course of three months rather than two days, and encourages the transformation from passive audience observer to active mhealth participant and thought leader. Lessons learned from around the world are not only shared and translated broadly for maximizing the benefit to human health, but also consolidated into a growing body of open-source knowledge on current innovations, best practices, and next steps in global mobile health.

14. TW Wiedmann and Neil Gesundheit (School of Medicine), “Health Literacy.” Fall 2013 - Spring 2013. The goal of this project is to develop and teach an innovative, effective, and engaging online/blended course in health literacy. Stanford undergraduates and early medical students will function as health educators with faculty guidance and oversight.

The course has the potential to be a model for extending the reach of the University and its students into communities – by filling a critical gap in health literacy that exists in the K-12 curriculum and that impacts our nation’s health.

15. Donna Bouley, (School of Medicine), “Mouse Pathobiology.” 2012-2013 Pilot. This course is an example of innovation in teaching undergraduates and is “blended on line strategy” pilot program in conjunction with UC Davis Extension, that would combine their excellent award-winning, on line programs (The Pathobiology of the Mouse, Tiers 1A & 1B, with narration and interactive “Whole Slide Imaging”), and several hands-on, small group laboratory workshops and discussion sections provided by the DCM. lt is designed the way they want to learn (self­directed, self-paced and online and with personal training for the technical skills) and will provide a unique study experience.

16. Gordon Lee (School of Medicine), “Surgery Essentials at your Fingertips.” Fall 2012-Winter 2013. This project will develop an amalgamated, online and iPhone/iPad portal of learning tools, "Plastic Surgery Essentials at Your Fingertips." Maintaining that surgical residents, fellows, and students often run hectic schedules, the goal is to provide a comprehensive, yet efficient, mode of instruction to complement weekly lectures. By providing instant access to three principal features including a reference source, an interactive base of learning modules, and a conglomerate of the most leading-edge research data pertaining to each respective topic, the plan is to prepare the surgical learner pre-lecture, reinforce the material post-lecture, and stimulate discovery throughout all points in time. Incorporating these aims into modern technology by employing grounded theories of education, with the hope of pioneering a paradigm of integrative, online education.

17. Kristin Sainani (School of Medicine), “Writing in the Sciences.” Fall 2012, hosted on Coursera. Professor Sainani is exploring new models for developing an online crowdsourcing approach to peer review through team-based collaborative writing and and peer-to-peer editing editing assignments. Professor Sainani will hold real-time editing sessions (In lieu of one-on-one editing sessions) on a few student pieces; all students in the class will attend these sessions virtually to observe editing process.