Three university departments have been awarded Curriculum Transformation Project (CTP) seed funding as part of Stanford’s Leveling the Learning Landscape initiative, which focuses on making the university’s introductory undergraduate courses accessible for all Stanford students. Awardees this year include teams in the Department of Biology, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS).
Leveling the Learning Landscape (L3) is a multi-year effort that supports Stanford faculty in reshaping courses and teaching strategies, and provides learning opportunities for students during the summers before and after their frosh year. To date, 12 instructional teams have been supported by the initiative, creating more than 25 new or redesigned courses that have been taken by approximately 2,700 undergraduates.
Teams applied in January to join the Curriculum Transformation Institute, a two-day workshop in April run by the Center for Teaching and Learning, designed to help instructors generate ideas, formulate goals, and develop their seed funding proposals with feedback from peers and students.
“We are excited to add three new teams to our introductory curriculum transformation efforts,” said Curriculum Equity and Innovation Faculty Director Mary Beth Mudgett, Susan B. Ford Professor and senior associate dean for the natural sciences in the School of Humanities and Sciences. “Collectively, the CTP teams are tackling important challenges in the classroom, including variations in student preparation and learning styles and rethinking the curriculum and pedagogical practices to enhance student engagement and learning.”
Project funding and support will begin this summer, with work continuing during the next academic year.
“Each transformation seeds new transformations within a department and across departments, resulting in a cascade of innovative changes that are taking root across our campus,” Mudgett said. “It is exciting to watch this unfold and help teams implement their projects in a network of learning.”
2025 Curriculum Transformation Project awardees:
Biology: Jessica Feldman, associate professor of biology, will lead efforts to assess student learning across foundation courses, design a companion course to teach core skills, and develop an AI learning diagnostic tool in collaboration with campus partners.
Materials Science and Engineering: Colin Ophus, associate professor of materials science and engineering, will lead efforts to formulate learning goals for introductory and core courses in the major and explicitly align them with program learning outcomes. Other efforts include adding interactive activities to each course, designing review materials and learning self-assessment modules for students, and launching a peer mentoring program.
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies: Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Feminist and Gender Studies, will lead efforts to formulate program and course learning objectives that will help students develop knowledge and skills that can be applied across disciplines. The project will also align key courses with these learning goals to ensure that students’ introduction to the field is both scholarly and emphasizes experiential and problem-based learning.
For more information
The L3 initiative is funded by an anonymous donor and supported by the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and the deans of the School of Humanities and Sciences, the School of Engineering, and the Doerr School of Sustainability.
Learn more about the seed funding initiative and past and present projects.
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Andrei Baltakmens
