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Carissa Little and I have known each other for a few years now through the Ivy+ Online Leaders group. In conversations with her, I always learn something new, and I am therefore grateful that she agreed to this Q&A.
Q: Tell us about your role at Stanford. What is the SCPD, and what are your main roles and responsibilities?
A: Thank you for having me, Josh. I’m the associate dean of global and online Education in the Stanford School of Engineering and the executive director of the Stanford Center for Professional Development and Stanford Online.
While we primarily serve Engineering, we also support schools across the university. We help faculty in the development of innovative learning models and new modes of access to Stanford educational opportunities for global learners. That means providing strategic support for program development, curriculum and instructional design, platform innovation, video production, marketing, enrollment, course delivery and credential delivery, all integrated within Stanford Online.
Stanford’s approach to online education is decentralized. The School of Engineering continues to offer the vast majority of online learning programs available from Stanford and was the first academic unit to offer distance learning degree programs and professional education credentials at Stanford.
Of its 100-year history, Engineering has offered part-time master’s degree programs at a distance for 70 of those years. This began in 1954 when Engineering launched the Honors Cooperative Program (HCP), a part-time master’s degree program in Electrical Engineering that enrolled 23 working engineers from local companies in nascent Silicon Valley. That HCP program evolved, over the decades, into a part-time distance learning master’s program in more majors, using closed circuit TV, then two-way Tutored Video Instruction (the precursor to online learning pioneered by former Engineering dean Jim Gibbons), satellite, and ultimately the internet for course delivery. HCP was the first industry education program at Stanford and established a model for academic-industry exchange that helped drive the innovation ecosystem of Silicon Valley.
SCPD was formed in 1995 and helped Engineering expand custom education for industry, government and nongovernment organizations that had first launched in 1986 with a Design for Manufacturability program for General Motors employees. In 1998, SCPD delivered the first complete online Master of Science in Engineering degree program for the Electrical Engineering Department. In 1999, SCPD established professional education—concentrated short-term courses and seminars—establishing some of the first professional education credentials for working engineers, certainly some of the first alternative credentials at Stanford.
From 2011 through 2016, during the MOOC era, there were some experiments with centralization, and SCPD played a key role, for example, in helping establish the Stanford Credential Framework, which was officially approved university-wide in 2019. We continue to steward the credential framework on behalf of the university. SCPD helped build stackability into the credential framework. For example, Stanford University also offers academic credit-bearing graduate education to qualifying, nonmatriculated students, pending department approval. These credit-bearing graduate certificate programs offer a flexible choice for working professionals who wish to develop deep expertise through a shorter course of study than a full master’s degree requires.
Graduate courses can be stacked together to earn a graduate certificate. Graduate certificate programs can help learners gain subject matter expertise in a relatively short amount of time. Courses or certificate programs can be stacked together to deepen knowledge in a specialized field, or learn a new field, in a manner akin to pursuing an advanced degree. Should a learner decide to pursue an advanced degree program, the academic credit earned through Stanford’s graduate certificate courses may be applied to a graduate program at Stanford or wherever else the student is accepted (according to that institution’s individual policies).
Q: At Stanford, what is the relationship between online and residential education? How do you see your work helping to advance all of teaching and learning at the University?
A: Residential education encompasses undergraduate and graduate education, and Stanford offers post-doctoral research fellowships as an R1 research institution. Campus students acquire new knowledge derived from expansive research. Online education through the School of Engineering is primarily post-baccalaureate, so best suited for working professionals and those prepared to study at the graduate level. Because online courses are taught by Stanford faculty and instructors, online learners also have the opportunity to acquire new knowledge gained from research—across our portfolio of professional education, graduate education and enterprise learning.
In the case of part-time blended or online-only master’s degree programs, the courses are literally the same courses taught on campus, captured live for semi-synchronous cohort delivery online. Some of our professional education courses, especially in Artificial Intelligence, draw upon the same graduate-level/master’s degree course material. They are quite rigorous. Matriculated students on campus have access to Stanford Online courses and may earn professional education and graduate certificates in addition to their degree.
Along with supporting online and blended education, we support certain aspects of the online learning infrastructure of the university. For example, we support the university’s video-capture installation that supports classroom-based lecture capture. We run a course production studio and a course delivery platform. As I mentioned, we also provide strategic support for program development, interactive learning design, marketing and enrollment, course delivery, and credential delivery, all integrated within Stanford Online.
The infrastructure that SCPD already had in place, along with others on campus who support Zoom and Canvas, and learning theory and practice, helped the University shift its residential courses to online delivery almost overnight during the pandemic in 2020.
The sudden switch to online learning created a lasting expectation for flexible course delivery options, so that demand and the interoperability of residential and online learning is still unfolding. In addition to an increased appetite for flexibility and the benefit of increased access to research-generated knowledge, higher education credentials are expanding to include more nondegree achievements. So, in addition to earning degrees, learners on-campus and off-campus can earn Stanford credentials at the professional or graduate level, in topics that may provide deeper knowledge in their field or more expansive, cross-disciplinary expertise that enables them to broaden their careers.
Q: Given your amazing career path (so far), what advice might you have for early-career colleagues who are interested in ascending toward a leadership role in online education?
A: I’ve been at Stanford for over twenty years and have been fortunate to support faculty in the innovations in online and global education, and I feel like I am just getting started. This is an evolutionary moment and we have an opportunity to further push the boundaries of interactive learning and to advance cohort and personalized learning.
There’s room for blue-sky thinking and pragmatism and a sense of fulfillment for those who are mission-driven. This isn’t a rest-on-your-laurels sector of higher ed; it is constantly changing.
My advice? Be ready to reinvent yourself. Use pilots to test new and improve existing ways of doing things and achieve operational excellence. Hire people who are smarter than you and who have an entrepreneurial spirit, and give them room to do their best work while staying focused on the mission, goals and the strategic plan.
Do the difficult stuff, the harder work—which is often higher stakes—that will help your operational capability leapfrog and your programs have a more meaningful, lasting impact for learners. In terms of advancing, take on matrixed organizational work that enables you to lead cross-functional teams and on challenging projects. I have been fortunate to have stellar mentors over my career, and finding a good mentor is a crucial part of evolving and learning.
