Course Design Resources

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CTL offers a number of resources to help you design new courses faster and more effectively, as well improve existing courses.

Early Career Faculty Seminar:
Course Design and Teaching for Learning

The 2012 Course Design and Teaching for Learning seminar (formerly “Course Design Boot Camp”) is open to Stanford assistant professors from all academic disciplines.  It will be held September 6-7 and 10-11, 2012.  For full details about this opportunity, including application and stipend information, see the Seminar flyer.

Individual Consultation

CTL's Associate Directors each address a specific disciplinary area (see below), and they will be glad to offer you customized individual assistance as you think about your new course. Please feel free to contact the relevant Associate Director to set up a meeting.

Robyn Dunbar, Ph.D.  Senior Associate Director for the Sciences and Engineering robyn.dunbar@stanford.edu
723-3920
Mariatte Denman, Ph.D Associate Director for the Humanities mdenman@stanford.edu
723-6487
Marcelo Clerici-Arias Associate Director for the Social Sciences and Technology marcelo@stanford.edu
725-0127

 

Course Design Aids

Below are links to three PDFs of course design aids which have proven useful to faculty in our course design seminars. The first document is an overview to course design, using a technique called "Designing Courses Backwards." The second document addresses writing clear, effective course objectives, and the third document is a set of course goals from Stanford courses in various disciplines.

Designing Courses Backwards

Thinking about Your Course Goals

Course Goals - Examples from Stanford Syllabi

Newsletter

We've devoted a special issue of our CTL newsletter, Speaking of Teaching, to the topic of course design. This is a great starting place for those who want to quickly pick up some strategies for better course design.

Click here for a PDF copy of this issue.

Resources outside CTL

The Cutting Edge Project, funded by the National Science Foundation, has put together a stand-alone online tutorial, geared primarily for faculty in the sciences and engineering, that guides you through the basics of designing a new course. Click here to access the tutorial.