stanford adventures in writing

Challenge

Design an online course about writing and rhetoric.

Make the course multimodal—to make use of both text and visuals to draw the reader into the subject matter.

“Adventures in Writing” was an online course created for the Stanford Program in Writing and Rhetoric and Stanford Online.

Solution

The team did brainstorming sessions and brought in visual examples they’d developed. Ultimately, we decided to make the content in a graphic-novel style format, melding text and visuals. We thought this style would be a unique and fun way for students to learn about grammar and rhetoric in a format with mass appeal.

In the end, the course was built in Stanford's version of EdX and featured 100+ pages of illustrated lessons created by Stanford student artists and written by lecturers in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric.

My role

I provided project management and technical leadership throughout the development and launch of this course, including coordinating the production of the art and getting the vast and complex course content into EdX. The course was online for about 5 years and reached tens of thousands of students.