Stanford University Continuing Studies Program

I took an online writing course with Sarah Stone called «Discovering Your Novel’s Secret Center» It was mediocre at best. Stone never really delved into anything very deeply and didn’t deliver any incisive intelligent anything. The drop date was three days after the class started and one day after the teacher posted the first assignment. How on earth can anyone figure out in less than 24 hours if a class is going to work out? The coup de grace was when one of the students critiqued my work in the most snarky, attacking way. I think she was secretly angry with me because I wasn’t participating full on – a fact i discussed with the teacher early on due to time constraints. Instead of defending me or calling out this behavior in the interest of keeping the forum safe and supportive for all the students, she noted that it was good for me to get a negative reading. REALLY???
Stanford is coasting on its reputation for this one. The quality of instruction was not great. Stone’s posted lectures were very long but with little helpful or incisive content.

Worst photography class ever. The description should be ‘instructor shares shots of his cute daughters’. The daughters are super cute, but despite the accolades that Stanford claims for Joel Stein, his pictures of his most beloved subject are only subpar. After a whole hour of going through his drive, the class shared their own respective pictures and there was nothing — NOTHING — educational about his feedback. He was almost scared of displeasing the students. Understandable. But educate your students in some other way! Joel himself is a nice guy, but I don’t want to pay people so much just because they are nice folks.
Unfortunately I did not think to research these offerings by Stanford Extension on Unilocal before signing up. And to this day I seethe and remain sorry for losing a couple hundred quid for one of the most boring, uneventful, useless class of my life. If you want to figure out the arcane functionality of your fancy DSLR, look elsewhere. Have signed up the hubby for a weekend seminar at the Aperture Academy and have high hopes from the reviews.

This 4 STAR rating is an average of my ratings for the classes I attended, listed below:
SPA 01: Beginning Spanish (Summer session)
— Rating: 5 STARS
— Taught by Hae-​Joon Won
— Prof. Hae-​Joon by far has been one of my favorite Spanish instructors ever in my life. Class was structured well and requires heavy participation. I took it for a grade which means I had to do the homework. In the end, it forced me to get more out of it. I really got to know the students in my class too. Highly recommended.
WSP 236: Women Leaders– Mastering Influence, Authenticity, and Power
— Rating: 5 STARS
— Taught by Dikla Carmel-​Hurwitz and Denise Rabius
— Helped me identify strengths and areas for improvement. Requires heavy participation. Great leadership class for women.
WSP 75: Effective Non-​verbal Communication
— Rating: 4 STARS
— Taught by Jeff Cabili
— Helped me identify areas for improvement. To this day, what I learned there is something I keep in mind when doing presentations.
WSP 177: Digital Photography Basics– Getting to Know Your Camera
— Rating: 2
— Was taught by Joel Simon
— Instructor was incredibly knowledgeable, easygoing and well-​prepared which I appreciated. It just took a long time to start learning core photo topics (aperture, shutter speed, composition). Too much time I think was spent on background/​history. Heavily lecture. Drawback– There isn’t really any opportunity to get instruction on how to apply topics to your own camera.
WSP 19: Negotiation Mastery
— Rating: 2
— Was taught by Jessica Notini

Accent Reduction for Non-​Native Speakers of English — I took this class. I got money back since I didn’t learn anything. The instructor forced all students to pronounce bad way as if «This is bad pronunciation that Chinese people speak! Repeat after me!». He continued how bad German and Japanese people pronounce.
It seems like the instructor is changed. The new person is teaching two same classes. Someone from school administration should monitor this class.

Kelly McGonigal’s classes are life-​changing, intellectually stimulating, and enjoyable. Every single one of them!

I’ve taken some classes here. The best class I took was a science class which rotated through speakers on different topics. It was excellent, super well organized, incredibly useful with the result of making me want to go there should I ever be in dire medical straits.
I’ve started to take a benign sounding personal development class, the instructor was one of the most demented fruitloops I’d ever encountered. I took a business course which was ok.
I also took a few writing classes here and for the price thought they were consistently low caliber. The instructors were variably uninterested or unavailable. The student demographic seems markedly different between the online and in person classes. The in-​person classes seemed like a more Palo Alto centric, slightly older community. The online classes populations were from all over the world. This meant for the online classes, there were a lot of timezone differences that made for some pretty disjointed classes. In the online writing classes the disjointedness was complicated by some students who were needy, or who would complain about the slightest reading load, and many/​most who never read others’ work. I haven’t yet taken a writing class that hasn’t been populated by people yearning to write their life story, regardless of what the class is supposed to be about. Although I personally might look elsewhere, there seem to be some people that really get things out of it. So don’t let me dissuade you.
If the classes themselves don’t seem to live up to the school’s caliber, the organization itself is very responsive. The staff are efficient and nice. Their online registration is easy and excellent. You can drop classes if you do it really quickly and that’s an option if they turn out to be not for you. (They also cancel classes if there’s not enough interest.) Some of the online forum software they use is clunky but other software tools are fine. The campus is of course beautiful if you take classes on campus.

«Where’s Dorothy?»
Ten years ago, the answer might have been that I was buried knee deep in books at the San Francisco Public Library…
In 2010, I’m alive, well… and taking a short story writing course with Shimon Tanaka at :
«The Stanford Online Writer’s Studio»
and you can too.
«Courses are open to all adults and all levels of writers are encouraged to enroll.»
That’s what the website says, but here’s the gosh-​darn truth…
This is one of the best writing programs available. Its both flexible and challenging. And both the teachers and your fellow students will stretch your «mental muscles.» You’ll do a lot of writing and read a lot of material… but you’ll come away from the program with a new-​found respect for what it takes to be a good writer.
Trust me, on this.
See you soon… D.

Just thought to write this up.
Stanford University Continuing Studies Program is as good as it can possibly get. Try this on for size:
Last spring I signed up for Jack Rakove’s course on The American Founders. He assigned 8 books to read (that was a LOAD!)
All eight authors showed up in person and spoke at the course. One of them, Annette Gordon-​Reed, won the Pulitzer Prize for History two days later. So, four of the eight authors turned out to be Pulitzer Prize winners.
The course was just totally over-​the-​top great!

Having gotten my diploma, then putting it neatly into a nice frame, and finally hanging it straight on the wall in my office above my clean glass desk, I will have to say publicly here what I have been saying privately for years… there is no bigger fan than I am of the Stanford Continuing Studies Department, it is perhaps the best extension-​based University program in the world. The courses, teachers and staff, are world-​class in every measure. In fact, you will, in many cases, find yourself being taught by the very best professors that Stanford has to offer.
Several of my thirteen course teachers were Stanford faculty that had been awarded Excellence in Teaching awards from their various departments or in a few instances, University-​wide awards. You just can’t get any better instruction anywhere and although the prices per unit have risen dramatically, they are still well-​worth it for the intellectual and spiritual value you will derive from them. After all, an education is the greatest gift that you can give someone or give yourself and also something that can never, ever be taken away. The C.S. staff is also amazing, from the top on down, everybody is friendly and efficient. If you have questions, they answer them right away. A+ for everyone.
Some of the courses I completed were; Music Appreciation, Leadership, Hemingway & Fitzgerald, The Jazz Pianists, Archaeology & the Bible, Gothic Cathedrals, Beginning Spanish, The Jazz Singers, Financial Planning 1 & 2, Financing the High-​Tech Startup, Jazz & the Concert Hall and the Invention of American Movies. Taking the Startup Course helped to get my angel-​invested company, «
financed so I got the most out of that one until the whole internet bubble crashed, then took us all down. And my Spanish course got IGETC’d by West Valley so I avoided taking 2 years of Spanish at Berkeley along with all of the C. S courses that I took before applying to CAL transferred in, so I saved a boatload of money there too. Yea for Stanford and for me too.
Personally, I love Stanford, all of it with a total love. I love the libraries, the parks, the museums, the churches, the stadiums, the bookstores, the golf course, the cafeterias, the pools and on and on. Often times when the weather is warm, I just drive up from San Jose, park my car and walk around with my business number forwarded to my cell so I can do two things at one time. The campus is gorgeous, with all of the oak trees, walking paths and sandstone buildings to feast your senses upon. The smells, the feeling of peace, the happy tourists and students going back and forth on bikes or with cameras just add to the bubbling inner excitement that you get when you enter Stanford’s space. In my opinion, Stanford is the finest university in the world and if I had my choice to go to any school, I would choose it over any other.