About Us
The Teaching Commons website is part of Stanford's Teaching Commons, a wide-ranging initiative to create a dynamic and sustainable ecosystem for instructors, departments, and participating units that cultivates a student-centered, scholarly, and inclusive culture of teaching and learning in which all students and instructors thrive.
This redesigned and relaunched Teaching Commons website builds on the original vision of Teaching Commons as a collaborative resource for teaching and learning at Stanford.
For additional teaching help
Schedule a consultation with the Center for Teaching and Learning, or with your unit's faculty development and academic technology specialists, as needed.
Teaching Commons: a brief history
Teaching Commons will be familiar to many at Stanford. The first iteration of the Teaching Commons was a flagship website project created in 2013 by the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), while in the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE)), and the Office of the Vice Provost for Online Learning (VPOL).
In 2015, CTL and VPOL joined with others to form a new unit, the Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning (VPTL). While many groups, including VPTL and the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), were active users of the Teaching Commons, traffic to the site gradually declined, and by 2020 the web-hosting platform was also outdated.
In 2020, the rapid transition to online learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic created a perfect opportunity to restart the Teaching Commons, just as CTL reconnected with VPUE. Over the summer of 2021 a collaborative team of higher-education professionals from CTL, VPUE, and beyond, with skills in technology, learning design, communications, and professional development, worked to rapidly redesign and develop content for the Teaching Commons, using a crowdsourced, collaborative approach to create an impressive and effective range of resources supporting Stanford’s pivot to remote teaching.
In 2021, as Stanford resumed in-person instruction, Teaching Commons was revised and expanded once more to support all teaching modalities and align with its original mission to support all teaching and learning, including on-campus and face-to-face instruction. The revised and extended site was unveiled at the beginning of the 2021–22 Academic Year.
The Teaching Commons team, 2021
- Andrei Baltakmens (CTL)
- Deila Bumgardner (School of Medicine)
- Jae Chung (CTL)
- Lauri Deitz (VPUE)
- Adam Hain (School of Medicine)
- Kimberly Hayworth (LTS)
- Kenji Ikemoto (CTL)
- Diana Heavenborn Lam (GSE)
- Kenny Ligda (CTL)
- Beth Seltzer (VPUE)
The Teaching Commons relaunch team, 2020
- Andrei Baltakmens (CTL)
- Jenae Cohn (VPUE)
- Kimberly Hayworth (LTS)
- Kenji Ikemoto (CTL)
- Shawn Kim (GSE)
- Kenny Ligda (CTL)
- Beth Seltzer (VPUE)
- Josh Weiss (GSE)
Teaching Commons archives
Material from the original Teaching Commons website is currently archived as unpublished content on the Teaching Writing website. Content specific to the PWR program is published on teachingwriting.stanford.edu and will remain so for the immediate future.
If you experience difficulty accessing certain pages, particularly earlier Teaching Commons content, you may contact Andrei or Beth, below, for help finding migrated or archived content.
If you regularly refer to non-PWR materials from the Teaching Commons archive, please let us know. This will help us prioritize material which we are bringing over and updating.
Learn more
To learn more about the project, contact Andrei Baltakmens (Communications Project Manager, CTL) and Beth Seltzer (Academic Technology Specialist, VPUE). We are not in charge of software decisions for the university and ask not to be contacted by outside vendors.