Five Stanford Law School faculty members have received seed grants from Stanford’s Office of Online Learning. The grants will help faculty develop online and blended classes, for Stanford students or as massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Richard Thompson Ford (BA ’88), George E. Osborne Professor of Law, is collaborating with faculty from Berkeley and France on a class called Comparative Anti-Discrimination Law. Students will be able to navigate online in non-linear fashion among source materials on such matters as employment, sexual orientation, gender, health care, religion, and hate speech. His course will be a “flipped” one, in which the course content is provided online and the class time is used for discussion. He also received funds from Stanford’s Office of International Affairs for this grant. Ford, whose expertise lies in antidiscrimination law, civil rights, and race, has written many books on these topics.

Michael Klausner, Nancy and Charles Munger Professor of Business and professor of law, will develop an online version of his popular Deals: The Economic Structure of Business Transactions course, in which concepts from finance, information economics, and law and economics are demonstrated with real-world business transactions—often with the people who originally worked on the deals present to discuss issues that arose. Klausner, who teaches and writes in the areas of corporate law, corporate governance, business transactions, and financial regulation, is currently writing a book on the economics of business transactions.

William Koski (PhD ’03), Eric and Nancy Wright Professor of Clinical Education and Youth and Education Law Project (YELP) director, and Jayashri Srikantiah, professor of law and Immigrants’ Rights Clinic director, received the grant to develop online education modules to provide new learning opportunities to students enrolled in Stanford’s legal clinics.   Video modules will guide students through skills shared by most clinics, such as professional correspondence, direct/cross examination, and courtroom demeanor, freeing up clinic class time for practicing the application of these skills in the context of real client-related work.  As founder and director of YELP, Koski is currently representing more than 60 students in Robles-Wong v. California, a lawsuit that seeks to reform California’s dysfunctional K-12 public school finance system. Srikantiah’s research and scholarly work explore the role of administrative discretion in immigration decision making in various areas, including human trafficking and immigration detention, and the pedagogy of multi-modal law clinics.

Jenny S. Martinez, associate dean for curriculum, is working with Claret Vargas, executive director of the Human Rights Center and lecturer in law, to develop an international human rights law online course that will be open to the public around the world. They will supervise law students working in teams  creating the first set of pilot course modules. The course will leverage the multimedia possibilities of the online platform and knowledge about how people learn best to design an innovative approach to learning about international human rights law. Martinez is a leading expert on international courts and tribunals, international human rights, national security, constitutional law, and the laws of war.