Contribute your content to the Teaching Commons

All current members of the Stanford community are invited to contribute content to the Teaching Commons website. Sharing your content can help to bring awareness to resources and best practices, and foster connection and relationships. This page describes ways that you can contribute content to the Teaching Commons cause.

Use the webform to submit your content for consideration

We will evaluate your submission at our next biweekly team meeting. Once evaluated, we will send you an email confirming the status of your submission and further information if needed.

Teaching Commons content submission web form

Current Stanford community members only

We welcome any current member of the Stanford community, such as faculty, lecturers, staff, students, and researchers to contribute. We respectfully decline contributors who are not current members of the Stanford community, such as alumni, peer institutions of higher education, commercial entities, and so on.

Limitations on the type of content

There are limitations to the type of content that we publish on the Teaching Commons site.

Education-related

Content should be relevant to teaching and learning. For example, unique perspectives on teaching and learning, educational research findings, or spotlights on noteworthy student, faculty, or staff achievements would be appropriate. Our primary audience is Stanford community members in instructional roles of all disciplines, expertise levels, and affiliations. This includes faculty, lecturers, TAs, graduate instructors, postdocs, staff, researchers, and so on, at Stanford University, Stanford Medicine, Stanford research institutes, or other Stanford institutions. 

Non-commercial

Content must be for non-commercial purposes. For example, we cannot publish content from Stanford community members that showcase resources from an entrepreneurial endeavor they are associated with. We generally do not accept purely promotional content, such as promoting an organization, product, or event.

For public use

We will cite the original author, but all submitted content will be licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 (attribution, non-commercial, share-alike).

Web-friendly

Content should fit within the constraints of a simple webpage and should consist primarily of text and images. Multimedia can be used to supplement the text and images of a webpage. Videos and audio files should be hosted elsewhere so that we can link or embed them. A single content piece should take about five to ten minutes to read. Most contributed content would be listed in the "Articles" section of this website.

About our editorial process

Our editorial process helps us to ensure a consistent style and quality of content. There are three common scenarios for our editorial process depending on where your proposed content is in the authoring process. 

Quickly publish content already on another Stanford site

Content that is already published on another Stanford website will be evaluated at our next team meeting. If approved, we will immediately publish a direct link to the URL of your published webpage in the Articles section. This style of direct link will list the title, short blurb, date of publication, and relevant tags in the Articles view. Users click the title to open the URL of your published content.

Work with our editors for content that needs to be adapted

Content in a different format, style, or genre than the Teaching Commons site may require editing to align with our style and accessibility guidelines and Stanford identity guidelines. Generally, this process follows these steps:

1. You submit your content for evaluation via the submission form.
2. One of our team members will reach out to you by email.
3. You and our team member coordinate to discuss any changes needed.
4. You draft your content on a copy of our Google Document template.
5. We provide feedback and assistance with any changes.
6. Once the draft is completed, we will create a mock-up page for your approval.
7. The page will be published at our next regular team meeting.

Collaborate with us on more substantial content

For content that may require a more substantial collaboration, such as proposed content that has not yet been authored or requires multiple web pages, we will contact you by email to schedule a consultation at our next team meeting.

About our team

See the About the Stanford Teaching Commons section of this website to learn more about us. If you have any questions, contact us at TeachingCommons@stanford.edu.