CourseWork and Stanford Syllabus

CourseWork

CourseWork is Stanford University's learning management system. Using CourseWork, instructors and TAs can set up a course web site that displays announcements, course materials, a syllabus, a schedule, online assignments and quizzes, a discussion forum for students, and a gradebook. CourseWork is designed both for faculty with little web experience, who can use CourseWork to develop their web site quickly, and for expert users, who can use CourseWork to organize complex, web-based materials and link them to web communication tools.

The use of CourseWork is optional and at the discretion of the instructor. Although many Stanford courses make use of CourseWork, not every course at Stanford has a CourseWork site. Students should ask their instructors if CourseWork will be used for their courses.

CourseWork was originally a home-grown product. The latest version of CourseWork (CourseWork v5) is based on an open source development effort, called the Sakai project. In 2003, Stanford University joined forces with a consortium of universities including MIT, UC Berkeley, Indiana University, and University of Michigan, to develop the next generation of teaching and learning tools for the higher education community. CourseWork v5 was released to the Stanford community in Fall 2006.

Stanford Syllabus

Stanford Syllabus is a centralized online repository of syllabi for Stanford University courses. Having syllabi available to students before they enroll in classes helps to facilitate course selection between students and their faculty advisors.

Instructors who use CourseWork may post their course syllabi to their associated course sites within CourseWork. Instructors who are not users of CourseWork may post their course syllabi at https://syllabus.stanford.edu. CourseWork is integrated with Stanford Syllabus, meaning that syllabi posted to CourseWork will automatically show up in Stanford Syllabus.

Stanford Syllabus was conceived by the Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Policy (C-USP), funded by the Provost's Office, and developed by Academic Computing. It was released to the Stanford community in Fall 2006.