Highlights
Theme and guest intro
Educational pathways explained
Private universities and public obligations
Innovative modalities and the creation of pathways
Partnerships and innovative new strategies
Measuring the impact of undermatching
Uplifting communities and the public good
Supporting non-traditional learners
Looking forward at Stanford
Final thoughts
Welcome to Season 3, Episode 6 of Teach & Learn: A Podcast for Curious Educators, by D2L. Hosted by Dr. Cristi Ford and Dr. Emma Zone from the Academic Affairs team. The podcast features candid conversations with some of the sharpest minds in the K-20 education space. We discuss trending educational topics, teaching strategies and delve into the issues plaguing our schools and higher education institutions today.
When the goal is a university degree or diploma from a private institution, learners can bank on a long road ahead. In some cases, the path traveled is straightforward; in other cases, it’s winding with more than a few detours, U-turns and full stops. While different, what these pathways have in common, is the destination.
But, what about low-income learners or those from under-served communities who are less likely to consider pursuing higher education from a private university? What can institutions do to create pathways that reduce undermatching? Should private universities have a responsibility to the public good and uplift communities outside their matriculated, tuition-paying student body?
In this episode of Teach & Learn, we reimage traditional pathways to create viable routes for learners from all walks of life, with Vice Provost for Digital Education at Stanford, Matthew Rascoff.
Together, he and podcast host Dr. Cristi Ford talk about:
- how online, and hybrid modalities create new pathways
- why private universities need to consider the public good
- the impact of taking action to curb undermatching
- what kinds of partnerships are valuable in these efforts
Full Transcript
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Listeners, historically, town and gown was a phrase to refer to the complex relationship between the university and the surrounding community. It also highlighted the interdependence between the two, but as the concept has evolved over time, do our higher education institutions still hold obligations to others beyond tuition-paying students? I’m Dr. Cristi Ford, along with my guest, Dr. Matthew Rascoff, Vice Provost for Digital Education at Stanford, and we’re diving into how that belief is being upheld and maybe even strengthened.
Dr. Emma Zone:
Welcome to Teach and Learn, a podcast for curious educators, brought to you by D2L.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Each week we’ll meet some of the sharpest minds in the K-20 space. Sharpen your pencils, class is about to begin. So good to have you here today, Matthew.
Matthew Rascoff:
Thank you so much for having me, Cristi. What a pleasure.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Absolutely. I really am excited about the conversation today. We’re going to really spend some time discussing pathways quite a bit in this episode. Before we delve in and learn a lot more about what you’re doing, your institution is doing, can you just provide a little bit more context by what you mean when you use this term, so all the listeners are on the same page?
Matthew Rascoff:
Sure. We use pathways to describe the process that students experience, but institutions and educational providers don’t always think about, and it’s the way we move through our lives educationally. If you’re a student and you’re going from high school to college, that feels like an enormous canyon that you need to cross. On one level, it’s the logic that we’ve defined for our system, but on another level, there’s so much friction in it. What we mean when we say pathways is redesigning the system in a more learner-centered way to take their perspective into account.
If you’re in a supply side, provider-centered mindset, yeah, that’s their system. Higher ed, this is our system, and any gaps in between, that’s your job to figure out, but the way we think about it is more how a learner might, which is to say, this is all my education. It’s just an artifice to say K-12 is one system and higher ed is another. Why did we decide that? That’s a historical artifact. The way people experience education is as a pathway, I think. It’s as a journey, and I think we, as designers of learning experiences, would do well to take that perspective more fully into account.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love this approach because oftentimes, as you know, sometimes we have this chasm that we talk about exists between K-12 and higher ed, but if we’re taking the learner’s perspective of a pathway, it really makes the onus upon us as institutional providers, institutions, K-12 providers, to really break down those barriers.
Matthew Rascoff:
Exactly.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love the fact that you’re using the word pathways, because we know that institutional sometimes mandates may think about one direct pathway, when in essence, there are a lot of different ways that our students come to our campuses. You wrote a piece where you discuss these pathways and how this obligation extends just beyond Stanford, but to all private universities. The piece, if I remember correctly, was entitled Private Universities Have Public Obligations, and listeners, we’ll link to this piece in our notes. When you talk about this piece that you wrote, what’s your argument in a nutshell, and what compelled you to write it?
Matthew Rascoff:
Thank you. Part of the argument, I think, is particular to Stanford, where I work, and part of it is about the private higher education sector. I think part of it is about the broader higher education sector. The idea is that we are, let me start with Stanford. We were founded as an institution that was dedicated to educating the sons and daughters of California. Part of what makes this place distinctive is that it was coed at the beginning. We had free tuition at the beginning of Stanford. For the first few decades as an institution, it was free tuition. The founding grant of the university that was put in place when we were established says that we have to take into account the public good and that we should be dedicated not just to the interests of our own community, to our own students and faculty, but to the broader public as well.
I think that’s a very powerful idea. Not every institution has that history, but we do. I think as we look to the future, it’s valuable to draw on the past and it’s important to understand institutional DNA and the roots as we try to design for growth that is organic, that is not artificial, that will be biologically accepted, not biologically rejected by the organ and by the body. I think drawing on history is one of my frameworks for thinking about innovation that is rooted, that does not feel that it’s implanted, that does not feel like it’s being opposed. Yeah, that’s the Stanford perspective.
The broader higher education perspective, I would say, is that our sector, whether you’re in a private university or a public university, is subsidized by the public. If you are at a private institution, you’re not paying taxes. Much of the funding comes from federal agencies. Everybody chips in for that. Every taxpayer in our country chips in for that. I think it’s not enough to say that we contribute to the commons, to the public good through the research enterprise. That’s fine. That’s a common answer to that. It’s absolutely true. I think that’s necessary, but not sufficient. I think on the educational side of what we do, we also have an obligation to contribute to the public. The selectivity of institutions, we were not designed for that. Nobody really wanted that. I think we need to find ways to redesign and to circumvent some of the bottlenecks that we’ve imposed in the admissions process to provide more educational public goods.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I really love this conversation, because too often, we talk about public versus private and there is this sense that sometimes this rhetoric around elitism and not focusing on the common good, so I appreciate your focus and feedback specific to Stanford, but then talking about the ecosystem as a whole, that we all collectively have this responsibility. In hearing about Stanford’s DNA around educational access, I really was reminded of the coed piece. I just hadn’t remembered that piece of this conversation. As we think about the concessions that Stanford made in its history, I think one of the things that I remember from the conversations in looking at some of the historical data is Jane’s Stanford solution was to allow learners to take classes without even becoming Stanford students.
Matthew Rascoff:
Exactly.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
That was one way the institution could maintain its admission standards and support the mission.
Matthew Rascoff:
Exactly.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I want to talk to you a little more about online. Given your experiences, how do you see this modality helping to support these various college pathways that you’ve talked about?
Matthew Rascoff:
When I started here in the fall of 2021, I launched a new team called Stanford Digital Education. We are in the central administration, reporting to the provost and we do mission-driven digital learning at Stanford. We are the central office that coordinates the efforts across the schools, but we have a mandate to rethink the goal and to position learning opportunities for those who’ve been historically underserved by higher education. The way we’ve thought about that is to build this program that’s focused on low-income high schools across the country. We use this criterion of Title I, It’s a federal criterion that defines a free and reduced lunch percentage of 40% or more. We built a model that actually taps in to that provisional student category that you described and reimagines it as an opportunity for non-admitted students to take courses from Stanford for credit through a hybrid model that is offered through a partnership with their local schools, a nonprofit called the National Education Equity Lab, which helps us run this title school network and Stanford faculty.
The model is that we bring together teaching fellows who are trained Stanford undergrads, grad students and alums, faculty, and then local teachers in the school, and we offer this hybrid course experience that has combinations of face-to-face and online, and it has combinations of synchronous and asynchronous learning that gives students a fantastic college course, the chance to learn rigorous material that is on the book, same learning outcome, same rigor as what we offer on campus, and to do it for credit that has both moral currency, psychological currency, and financial currency for them. It’s a boost for them, for their academic aspirations, for their growth mindset, and also for their social capital, because it turns out those teaching fellows from Stanford are some of the best ambassadors of the university that we can send out into the world. They become near peer connectors.
They themselves report that it’s the most meaningful thing they’ve done at Stanford in the past year. Most of them say that. It’s a projection of Stanford knowledge, not just to the world generally, but specifically to low-income high schools, where we know from the data that the most talented students never even show up on the admissions radar of selective colleges. The majority of the most talented low-income students in the US never apply to any selective college. That’s research that was done here at Stanford. It’s sometimes called undermatching. That’s a jargon term, but it’s basically a gap in that system between the K-12 and higher education system, that question that you asked me at the beginning.
This is one of the critical gaps. Low-income students are under-counseled, under-advised, and they’re not told that if you applied to Stanford, you’d get in and you’d get full financial aid, so they opt out of that system. Our message is we want those students to not just be identified, but we want to cultivate that talent. We want to give them opportunities to learn with us, to demonstrate their potential and to grow their potential. That’s the model that we’ve designed to reach upstream into that earlier system to the precursors in junior and senior year of high school and give opportunities in communities that have never had a model of dual enrollment from any selective college, let alone Stanford.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Man, I have so many questions for you. When you talk about mission-driven innovation, you think about the selectivity of an R1 or the selectivity of a private or an Ivy and this public good. How, as people are listening and thinking about maybe their own institutions, how do you create change management in a way or how do you create opportunities to help others prioritize this public good in the midst of everything else the university is working on? That’s just a question I’m thinking about as I’m seeing how you’ve done it so successfully at Stanford.
Matthew Rascoff:
Yeah. It’s a great question. I think the answer is probably different at different institutions, so I would hesitate to tell somebody to just use our model. I think the goal is to find synergies between the private interests of the institution and the public good and to redefine those as a positive sum game rather than a zero sum game. When I say that our teaching fellows report that co-teaching in our program is the most meaningful thing they’ve done, that’s me hunting for those opportunities for our own matriculated students to benefit and to learn. Our faculty love the program, too. I now have a backlog of faculty who want to work with us. I think enlightened self-interest is the framework. It’s not absolute altruism. Institutions, organizations don’t act out of altruism. Enlightened self-interest means that sometimes what is in the public interest, it’s also in our interest if we understand that interest properly. Your job as an innovator is to go hunting for the right sources of that interest and the right partners both outside and inside, and to be the enabler and the broker who uncovers those opportunities for creating shared value.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
As I think about this last year and a half, as we’ve come out of the pandemic and many institutions are trying to redefine the value proposition of higher education, I think this example in case study really hits the heart of this opportunity to really be able to meet students where they are. I think the term you used was finding undermatched students who really should be in our institutional settings, so I want to ask a little bit more about your partnership with, I think you said it’s the National Education Equity Lab. Can you talk about the importance of that partnership with Stanford and how that partnership came to be?
Matthew Rascoff:
Absolutely. I think doing partnerships is also a key innovation strategy, just getting better at it and curating them and letting good organizations in and keeping the bad ones out. That’s a really important role for those of us who sit on the margins of the institution and can open the gates, not completely, but thoughtfully to the right allies who share our goals. The National Education Equity Lab is a startup non-profit organization. It’s led by a terrific education reformer, former Obama administration education official. Her name is Leslie Cornfeld. They help us.
They bring these students to us, so they help run the network of schools and they’re recruiting Stanford and other great universities, and we help them bring universities onto this network to create a many-to-many two-sided marketplace, you could think about it. It’s not a market in the conventional sense. It’s not a for-profit model, but there’s universities that want to offer courses and high schools that want to receive them and offer them to their students, and they’re the intermediary that’s helping to set this up. They’ve been a great ally for us. I think we, in great institutions, need to find more allies. We need more friends.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yes, we do.
Matthew Rascoff:
We need to work better with one another and also with the nonprofit community-based organization sector, the civil society sector, and we have an important role in attaching our own credibility to models like this and saying, “This is valid, this is worthwhile.” Since we have joined many other institutions, I just heard Vanderbilt last week signed an MOU with them. They look to us and they say, “If Stanford’s doing it, we can, too.” I think that’s another important innovation phenomenon. You can use the isomorphism and some of the herd dynamics of higher education for better. We look to peer institutions, so that’s just a reality. That can hurt or it can help. Use that for good. Use that factor as a possibility for scale and for building a movement and for influencing our peers.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love all of this. Before we move on, I just would love to hear a little bit about the cohorts that you’ve had so far. What do you know about the students that have come through your program? Do they end up in your pipeline? How much information do you know and how are you measuring the impact?
Matthew Rascoff:
That’s a great question. We do track the impact. There’s a study with Robert Balfanz, who’s a professor at Johns Hopkins, who’s longitudinally tracking what happens to these students. Seven of them are now undergraduates here at Stanford. Just this week, I actually got to see two of them, a freshman and a junior here, two women, fantastic students. One of them is from rural New Mexico reservation, a community that’s never sent a student to Stanford since our founding in 1891, since the reservation was established. She’s the first, not just in her family, but her entire community to ever come here. Yeah, that was incredible. The other one is from Urban LA, South Central LA. That’s part of it is bring the students to Stanford, but undermatching is not going to be solved by Stanford. The research shows it’s about 35,000 students per year who are in that category of the top ten percentiles of grades and test scores who never apply to any selective college.
We only have 1700 seats in our freshman class, so we can’t do that on our own. That’s why we’re thinking in this consortium, collective way. We’ve sent students to Columbia and Princeton, all the other great universities and all of the state flagships as well. You and I have some North Carolina connections. I previously worked at the University of North Carolina system, so I understand that’s actually where you can really address the undermatching challenge, because that’s where most of the seats are. They’re in state flagships. If you can raise a student’s sights to go to a state flagship that they might not otherwise thought they could get into, that would have financial aid for them, that’s a win for us. We call that the assist. We set you up. We don’t have to score all the baskets. We got seven baskets. That’s wonderful, students coming here, but that’s not commensurate with a challenge of 35,000 per year.
We all need to play the game of assists. We all need to pass the ball. If you play this like a team sport, I think you could actually chip away at that challenge of undermatching. The whole Ed Equity Lab Network, I think we’ll have 15,000 students enrolled this academic year, so that’s starting to get into the right order of magnitude to address this challenge. Meanwhile, it’s not just about that top ten percentiles for me. We bring whole cohorts of students from a school. We don’t do individual loan geniuses. I don’t believe in that. What we ask schools to do is to send a whole class and a teacher that take the course together.
I think that there’s important metacognitive lessons in the team dynamic within the school, in the learning community that you can build, the supportive, collaborative opportunities to help one another, to tutor one another, to coach one another. We’re not looking for just individuals. We’re looking for cohorts. I think there’s an important democratic educational role in investing, in building capacity for the teacher and for the school, not just plucking individual geniuses out and sending them to a boarding school or bringing them to Stanford for the summer. There are many talent search programs that do that, and I don’t believe in that at all. What we want to do is embed it in the school that lifts up a whole class together.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love this, because what I hear you talking about is really being able to resource communities and really being able to provide opportunities not just for the best and the brightest, but to lift all sails at the same time.
Matthew Rascoff:
Who knows what the best and brightest even means? They’re sophomores in high school.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yes. That’s right.
Matthew Rascoff:
Talent sometimes just is not recognized by-
Dr. Cristi Ford:
It takes a while sometimes.
Matthew Rascoff:
Exactly. Some of it needs to be cultivated and supported. If you don’t believe you have it, you might not be showing up for your teacher, so we need to stay humble. I think standardized testing is a form of arrogance. It says, “Oh, we can find that genius in the cradle. If you just had the right test, we would know in the womb who’s going to be the next.” Forget that. Geniuses are made, they’re not born.
Our role is not about geniuses necessarily. It’s about communities. It’s about building more collective models that create opportunity for everyone. Even as we are participating in this elective, meritocratic system, it needs a counterbalance. It needs a democratic counterbalance, and that’s what we’re trying to do. I think those, they’re often intention, but part of what the magic of digital learning offers is that we can take a more abundant approach to learning. It doesn’t have to be scarce the way it was in the past. There’s opportunities to share and to democratize education without harming the highly selective undergraduate admissions or graduate admissions system that prevails here and at our peer institutions. The place is still doing just fine, and we can still enroll thousands of non-matriculated students and offer them credit. It hasn’t harmed anything. Quite the contrary. It has only benefited Stanford and its own community.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
As I listen to you talk about college pathways and dual enrollment and really investing in communities and the innovation work, I’d love to understand. You talked about the research happening at Johns Hopkins, the longitudinal research. If there are other research studies and as you’re looking around this landscape and thinking about these innovations, are there other ways that if people are not prepared or ready as an institution to be a provider of dual credit or have all the institutional pieces together, are there other ways that you see people are leaning in and really starting to think about this public good and really starting to raise up communities?
Matthew Rascoff:
Absolutely. I look to organizations like Texas OnRamps as a model for how a state flagship can invest in pathways. It’s a profound innovation that I think many state systems and state flagships could replicate. In fact, I learned recently that the University of Illinois is replicating that model in a statewide strategy with support from the American Talents Initiative, Aspen Institute. They just put out a release led by Lisa Anderson, who I’m proud to say is an alum of our team. She’s the digital learning leader at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She’s driving a statewide model for working with teachers to support college pathways through college level coursework that’s embedded in schools.
We have not perfected this approach. It’s far from a monopoly. What we’re trying to do is build networks of mission-driven educational improvement and change. We’re just at the beginning. There’s so many different ways that you could approach this. I’ve learned more recently about college advising and counseling, and there’s all sorts of interesting innovations that are happening in that space, using digital to connect undergraduates to high schoolers, to build more effective, relationship-based counseling.
There’s a nonprofit that has a chapter at Stanford called Matriculate that is led by students who are assigned to four high schoolers who have to meet a set of criteria, GPA and recommendation criteria. Then they get this intensive one-to-four ratio of near peer college counseling. They don’t have that. Most schools have one to 400 ratios, not one to four ratios for a professional counselor. Every college or university could have a chapter of Matriculate with a little bit of support that enables your students to represent you and to support low income college pathways. It doesn’t require coursework. This is on the administrative side, not the academic side of college admissions, but taking on the FAFSA is no joke if you’ve never approached it, if your parents didn’t go to college.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Even before the changes. Even before all the changes.
Matthew Rascoff:
People need a lot of help. Exactly. Exactly. We should simplify it for everybody, but it’s still a process. If you’re the first in your family to go to college, you need help, and schools aren’t always set up for that. That’s a role that I see institutions playing. Enable your students to participate in programs like that and support it and join. Matriculate has a membership model for institutions to join in. We did that recently in collaboration with our admissions office and our Haas Center for Public Service, and that’s been fantastic.
There’s so many different approaches that I think are exciting, but to me the key is point the innovators at these challenges. Focus on these audiences. If you don’t think about them, if you think your job is just serving working professionals, you’ve missed the biggest opportunity for serving the underserved learners. It’s fine to serve working professionals, but only a third of adults have a degree, so if you’re focusing on people who already have a degree, what about the rest of our society?
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Good point.
Matthew Rascoff:
That, to me, is a missing piece of most strategies, most digital learning strategies.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
What do you say to folks who are turning away from looking at high school students as a main opportunity for enrollment because the enrollment numbers are dwindling in terms of the numbers of students who are graduating from high school and moving into higher ed? How do we get people to change the narrative of those kinds of conversations?
Matthew Rascoff:
Yeah, I’m sure your listeners know the demographic research from Nathan Grawe and the clearinghouse numbers this year that show that first year enrollments are down, although I understand there’s typically an adjustment a few months later, so before worrying too much about a headline of 5% decline, we should wait a couple of months and see what the adjusted numbers are. Yeah, at the UNC system when I was there, we focused on some college no degree as the main online audience. We were building online undergraduate programs that were intended to serve those who had stopped out and supporting their pathways back to college. I think that’s, for online strategies in public universities, that makes a lot of sense. The some college no degree population, I think now exceeds 40 million.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
It’s huge. It’s huge.
Matthew Rascoff:
When I there ten years ago, it was in the 30 millions. I don’t remember the exact numbers, so that, to me, is it’s a critical challenge. There are great organizations that are helping with that too. There’s one called ReUp, which helps institutions re-enroll those who have stopped out, and there were many innovators in that space. UNC Charlotte built a program that was focused on the city of Charlotte and it was an information campaign. It was around de-stigmatizing returning to college and resetting your sights, a second chances model, and I love that.
Yeah, I think online undergraduate programs historically have been oriented towards adult learners. The first time student population actually also continues to grow online. They also want online courses. It’s not instead of at this point, but I think most selective institutions have focused on master’s degrees, but there’s now a lot more movement in bachelor’s degrees for adults. Cornell University recently approved an online bachelor’s program. The faculty approved it a couple of weeks ago.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Which is fantastic to hear.
Matthew Rascoff:
That is a monument. It’s a huge achievement. At the University of Pennsylvania in the School of Arts and Sciences, the core liberal arts part of the University of Pennsylvania, they have an online bachelor’s program that I believe in enrolls one out of seven Penn undergrads.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Wow.
Matthew Rascoff:
That is an immense achievement in the context of a highly selective institution. In the arts and sciences heart of the university, they built an online bachelor’s success story that is for adults, so we need more examples like that.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
We do.
Matthew Rascoff:
I so admire institutions that have moved in that direction. Like it or not, those places set a certain standard for the entire system. They give permission to the rest of the sector to act. When they act that way, they give permission to the rest of us to act. That is exciting.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love when you said something to the phrase of using the headwinds for good, really thinking about some of the selective institutions that have the opportunity to really change the narrative of where higher education is going and change the narrative and stigma that we have historically put on underrepresented populations, we’ve put on online education, digital learning. We’ve just changed the narrative drastically around these topics.
Matthew Rascoff:
Exactly. That is part of the privilege of working at a place like this. People look to us for leadership and what we do influences the strategies of other institutions. Use that power for good. While you have it, in the short amount of time that you get to work at these institutions that last hundreds of years, use the platform to share what we have.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I appreciate that. Matthew, what’s next for you? What’s next for the work that you’re leading at Stanford?
Matthew Rascoff:
We have a new president at Stanford who’s put out a very exciting mandate in his inauguration speech that’s focused on expanding access to learners worldwide. The vision is that there’s an order of magnitude more learners around the world who could benefit from a Stanford education compared to when he, President John Levin was an undergraduate here at the early ’90s. That’s an exciting challenge for us to take on, especially in the context of a de-globalization and a return to nationalism and protectionism, which he also addresses in his speech. We are trying to figure out how to do that and what that means. There’s a lot of exciting ideas, I think, that are emerging from this community with a mandate to reimagine a global strategy.
It’s not predicated on global campuses necessarily, but uses all the digital and human capital tools that our disposal to provide more educational opportunity to those who could benefit from it around the world. I published a piece recently about an emerging open education strategy that we call Living Textbooks. It’s a reimagination of the textbook as an open source project. There’s now three or four of them that have come organically from Stanford faculty. They’re built generally on GitHub, which is a platform for open source collaboration, and many of them have a combination of content and code, so there’s a quantitative component that benefits from having digital first representation, but they also have print representations.
Many of the more progressive university presses are willing to do peer review and to produce a print version of these books that can live alongside an open source digital version of the book. It’s not like a PDF EPUB that you would download. It’s an active, living, breathing, open source community that people can respond to and they can fix problems and they can translate it and repurpose it and globalize it, because the content that we produce here could be valuable in other parts of the world. GitHub, unusually, is open in China. Many other community-generated platforms are blocked in China, but because it’s the foundation of open source collaboration, even China, which is closing its technological borders, remains open to that one.
Many of the challenges around previous open educational concepts were around technological sustainability. The idea is that if we don’t worry too much about the technological layer, just use the existing technology collaboration platforms that are out there, but instead think about the content and application layer and the implementation, like supporting community colleges and using content that we create and building courses of their own based on it, that’s actually higher value adding and it reduces some of the technological burden and the challenges that other open source projects or open education projects have faced in the past.
I’m excited about that. I wrote a piece recently about it, and I love when you find organic faculty movement. We didn’t tell anybody to do this. I just did some pattern recognition. I was like, “Oh, this is happening in the psychology department. Then here at the Doerr School of Sustainability, there’s another group of faculty who want to do one of these. Put them together, document it, and then see if we can get more. Build a service around it.”
Dr. Cristi Ford:
That’s right.
Matthew Rascoff:
I think that is another, you were asking me about innovation strategy, that’s another one. Just listen. Listen to what the innovators are already doing and figure out how you can unblock the next ones who want to do more of what they’re doing.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I just really always appreciate talking with you. I always leave inspired. I always leave with new information, new opportunities to think about the work that we both love and have just committed our lives to. I know, listeners, we’ve given a lot of information here. Matthew has given you a lot of opportunities to think about this work. We’ll do our due diligence and make sure that we note all of this in the show notes. Matthew, thank you so much for the time.
Matthew Rascoff:
Thank you.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Really great to see you.
Matthew Rascoff:
Likewise.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Is there any lasting comment that you want the listeners to be able to take away before we close out this episode?
Matthew Rascoff:
We have a newsletter that I would love people to sign up for, and we’ll link to that as well. We are open, and I think we love hearing from readers. I respond. I read. I respond, social media, email. We want to be engaged in these questions, so I encourage your listeners to reach out. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be with you and to engage more in the future.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Absolutely. I want to thank our listeners as well. Thank you for being our dedicated listeners and curious educators everywhere. Remember to follow us on social media. You can find us on X, Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook @D2l and subscribe to the D2L YouTube channel. You can also sign up for the teaching and Learning studio email list for the latest updates on new episodes, articles, masterclasses. If you like what you’ve heard, remember to rate us. Give us a review, share the episode, and remember to subscribe so you don’t miss anything. Bye for now.
Dr. Emma Zone:
You’ve been listening to Teach and Learn, a podcast for curious educators, brought to you by D2L. To learn more about our K-20 and corporate solutions, visit D2L.com. Visit the Teaching and Learning Studio for more material for educators by educators, including masterclasses, articles and interviews.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Remember to hit that subscribe button and please take a moment to rate, review and share the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Until next time, school’s out.
Resources Discussed in the Episode
- Vice Provost's Notes
- A History of Stanford
- National Education Equity Lab
- American Talent Initiative- Aspen Institute
- Stanford Matriculate: Instagram
- Stanford Newsletter
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Speakers
Dr. Cristi Ford
Vice President, Academic Affairs at D2L Read Dr. Cristi Ford's bio
Dr. Cristi Ford
Vice President, Academic Affairs at D2LDr. Cristi Ford serves as the Vice President of Academic Affairs at D2L. She brings more than 20 years of cumulative experience in higher education, secondary education, project management, program evaluation, training and student services to her role. In this role, she offers thought leadership and direction to the academic affairs unit of the organization. Her previous roles have allowed her to have impact in education from secondary and higher education settings within North America and as part of the international landscape. Her reach has allowed her to focus on building online education in the US and in Africa.
In addition to her experience building new online learning programs and research related to online teaching and learning, Dr. Ford possesses significant experience in the design and delivery of integrated educational support, training and transition services for young adults and children with neurodevelopment disabilities.
Dr. Ford was selected by the Online Learning Consortium as the 2022 OLC Fellow (the highest professional distinction offered by the association). She is a tireless advocate for quality online education and has leveraged her passion and expertise in many realms in the education space. She is known for utilizing her leadership in extraordinary ways to help institutions build capacity to launch and expand online programming through effective faculty development, instructional design and pedagogical practices.
Dr. Ford holds a PhD in Educational Leadership from the University of Missouri-Columbia and undergraduate and graduate degrees in the field of Psychology from Hampton University and University of Baltimore, respectively.
Matthew Rascoff
Vice Provost for Digital Education at Stanford Read Matthew Rascoff's bio
Matthew Rascoff
Vice Provost for Digital Education at StanfordMatthew serves as Stanford University’s senior administrator for digital learning and leads the Stanford Digital Education team.
From 2017-21 he was the Associate Vice Provost for Digital Education and Innovation at Duke University, where he founded and led Duke Learning Innovation. He was previously Vice President and founder of the Office of Learning Technology & Innovation for the University of North Carolina system.
Matthew launched JSTOR’s first international office in Berlin, led product teams at Wireless Generation (now Amplify), and built and launched their product development center in Durham, North Carolina.
Earlier in his career Matthew helped launch the strategy group at ITHAKA, an incubator of higher education technology ventures (now Ithaka S+R). Matthew’s experience also includes Google, where he worked on the Book Search project to digitize the world’s published works.
After undergraduate studies at Columbia University he did graduate work at Bogazici University in Istanbul on a Fulbright Scholarship and later earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. He has been a Marshall Memorial Fellow, a Bertelsmann Foundation Fellow, a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow, a Stanford Fellow, and in 2025 will be a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow.
