How to create a Stanford course
This is the first post in a three-part retrospective on teaching CS 40.
Last quarter (Winter 2024), Cody Ho and I taught CS 40 Cloud Infrastructure and Scalable Application Deployment at Stanford, a new course we’d been working on creating for nearly a year. CS 40 is Stanford’s first-ever hands-on intro cloud computing course, and with 50 students enrolled, achieving our instructional goals of leaving students with a robust understanding of the material was no easy feat.
Wrapping up the quarter, I’m thrilled with how the course turned out, even given how hectic it was at times. This post is a retrospective on the process of designing the course, getting it approved, and building out course content before the start of the quarter.