eLearning at Stanford
Summary Report by Jay Cross

On February 21, 2003, eLearning Forum met at Wallenberg Hall on the Stanford campus. Fifty members attended in person, and another twenty-five attended by WebEx. In 1898, Wallenberg Hall was Stanford's library. A hundred years later the building was gutted. Its interior was rebuilt as a flexible, high-tech environment for innovative learning experiements. Classrooms were designed for collaboration and flexibility. None of the walls are load-bearing and some are hinged, so Wallenberg can be reconfigured with ease.

Stanford has numerous programs in learning research (and production). John Nash, Andy DiPaolo, Melissa Regan, and Bob Smith shared glimpses of the riot of activites taking place in and around Wallenberg Hall.

Record attendance!
Wallenberg Hall
Coffee, food, entrance to our meeting room	Where we met	Rob coordinating WebEx
High ceilings	Three video screens in front	HooTow

	The Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning. Established in 2002 as an independent center of excellence at Stanford University, SCIL is dedicated to conducting scholarly research and related activities that advance the sciences, technologies, and practices supporting learning and teaching from early childhood through post-secondary education.
Media X	Media X organizes partnerships with industry, foundations, and governments who collaborate with faculty and students in classrooms and laboratories. In shorthand, substitute X for Media at the MIT Media Lab, and you get the basic concept.
	Stanford Center for Professional Development. In partnership with over 450 member companies and government organizations, SCPD delivers Stanford academic programs to more than 5,000 students annually via broadcast television, videotapes, and the Internet.
	The Stanford Humanities Laboratory offers the opportunity for scholars in the humanities to undertake the sort of mid- to large-scale collaborative research projects that have traditionally been the domain of the natural, formal, and social sciences. The humanities has generally had fewer research funds (thus discouraging resource-intensive scholarship), as well as little incentive to collaborate.
	Executive Education programs provide research-based, globally relevant frameworks for addressing the issues senior executives face every day.

Bob Smith & John Nash	Bob & the facility	Wallenberg plan
Classroom	Another classroom	i-Mac Touchscreen building directories

We covered much too much ground in our morning together for me to capture it here. I'll note a few items that caught my attention and later direct you to the more comprehensive documentation other eLearning Forum members are working on:

• Improving learning inside the campus community is the primary focus inside Wallenberg Hall. After all, a former president once said you could take Stanford’s entering freshmen, put them in a motel in the Midwest, and four years later, they’d have pretty much a Stanford education.
• SCIL is working with MIT to build an open-standard course management system.
• The Interactive Simulated Patient challenges students at Stanford Med School to identify his disease. The student can call up 1500 different lab tests and 350 x-rays, but ordering superfluous tests dings the student's economic rating. Patient Tom has an attitude. If you ask him a question a second time, he replies “I already answered that.”
• i-labs at Stockholm, Hanover, and Stanford enable students share expensive lab equipment as if it were local, illustrating theoretical concepts with the real thing and saving money to boot.
• Center for Professional Development has a production process many corporations would love. Two hours after a class concludes, it's available online. Delivery used to be 70/30 live to asynchronous. Recently the ratio has reversed. People don't have time to attend synchronous classes. The live portion may eventually die out entirely.
• In a joint program with Harvard Business School, the Stanford Business School is producing CDs on hot topics which include a recorded one-hour, famous-professor lecture, a study guide, and links to related materials, all for around $125 retail.
• The SCPD produces 10,000 new program hours annually in digital form. In rapidly changing subjects like engineering, they generally refresh the entire curriculum annually.

SCIL network projects

Sim Patient

Kristian asks a question

With 75 attendees, this was the most well-attended eLearning Forum session ever.

• Quite a few corporations attended. Off the top, I remember Del Monte, Macromedia, Genentech, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Calyx. We also dreaw particpants from four local universities.
• WebEx gets high marks from our remote participants. Soon you'll also see photographs taken by Mentorware.