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A new technology team in the Provost’s Office will support campus-wide innovation.
Erin DeSilva, associate provost for digital and online learning, and Joshua Kim, assistant provost for online learning strategy, are coordinating the team.
As more faculty and students harness the power of technology, Provost David Kotz ’86 has centralized the work of a cadre of learning designers, media specialists, and educational technologists to help faculty support learning in ways that would have been barely imaginable a decade ago.
Erin DeSilva, now the associate provost for digital and online learning, and Joshua Kim, assistant provost for online learning strategy, will coordinate the team within the Office of the Provost and collaborate with partners across all schools, programs, and departments.
“Digital technology provides tremendous opportunities for the way we teach and learn—both for on-campus, in-person learning environments and for online and hybrid educational programs,” says Kotz. “For Dartmouth to continue delivering an outstanding student experience, our faculty needs to keep innovating in the classroom and online. This new structure allows the Dartmouth team to coordinate its efforts across the whole campus, to support faculty who innovate with technology in teaching, and to enable the launch of new online certificate and degree programs.”
The impetus for the restructuring came from the provost’s Ad Hoc Committee for Online Learning Strategy, which began meeting in 2022 in response to the rapidly evolving opportunities of digital technology in higher education. It recommended that a new unit be formed to set priorities and advance a compelling vision for digital and online learning; support and execute institution-wide digital and online initiatives that align with Dartmouth’s mission and values; and review, develop, and implement policies relating to compliance, student support and resources, data management, program design and development, and financial management.
DeSilva says the consolidation of technological expertise and resources comes at a pivotal post-pandemic moment, when people have become more comfortable and adept at meeting in cyberspace while, at the same time, artificial intelligence is beginning to revolutionize research, teaching, and learning.
“From my perspective, what’s most important is that the people who are supporting our online education are the same people who are supporting our residential education,” says DeSilva. “That helps to ensure that students are receiving the Dartmouth experience regardless of where their learning takes place.”
Dartmouth is already in the midst of modernizing about 100 Arts and Sciences and Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies classrooms.
And several of Dartmouth’s schools and programs are expanding access for nonresident learners.
Thayer School of Engineering recently launched an online Master of Engineering in Computer Engineering and also offers an online Professional Certificate in C Programming with Linux. The Tuck School of Business offers several online executive education certificate programs, a virtual January session of the Tuck Business Bridge program, and, in partnership with the Geisel School of Medicine, two hybrid degrees: the Master of Health Care Delivery Service and the Master of Health Administration degree. And the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society offers an online course, Energy Justice: Fostering More Equitable Energy Futures.
Kim says innovative opportunities like these are the wave of the future, aligning closely with priorities President Sian Beilock has set to “have a strong impact on higher education and the direction of our post-secondary system—to show up in a world where big and exciting things are happening.”
For example, Kim says it’s important to make rigorous master’s degrees and certificate courses of study available to those who live far from campus, or who cannot afford to leave their jobs in order to advance their studies.
“Traditionally, teaching is a solo sport, but at its best, online instruction takes a team,” says Kim. “Dartmouth has an incredible faculty who are passionate about creating knowledge, and now we can combine them with experts steeped in the literature of learning science, and who understand best practices to bring that learning science into instruction while creating and supporting new communities of learners.”
While much may change in what Kim calls Dartmouth’s “online infrastructure” in the coming years, he says time-tested pedagogical pillars will remain foundational.
“We’ll continue to provide students with a strong liberal arts education based on interactive relationships with teacher-scholars, holding fast to those core values as we make a Dartmouth education available to more people—not just a very lucky few who can live on or near campus,” he says.
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Dartmouth College is a private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution and among the most prestigious in the United States. Although founded to educate Native Americans in Christian theology and the English way of life, the university primarily trained Congregationalist ministers during its early history before it gradually secularized, emerging at the turn of the 20th century from relative obscurity into national prominence.
Following a liberal arts curriculum, Dartmouth provides undergraduate instruction in 40 academic departments and interdisciplinary programs, including 60 majors in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering, and enables students to design specialized concentrations or engage in dual degree programs. In addition to the undergraduate faculty of arts and sciences, Dartmouth has four professional and graduate schools: the Geisel School of Medicine, the Thayer School of Engineering, the Tuck School of Business, and the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies. The university also has affiliations with the Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center. Dartmouth is home to the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences, the Hood Museum of Art, the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, and the Hopkins Center for the Arts. With a student enrollment of about 6,700, Dartmouth is the smallest university in the Ivy League. Undergraduate admissions are highly selective with an acceptance rate of 6.24% for the class of 2026, including a 4.7% rate for regular decision applicants.
Situated on a terrace above the Connecticut River, Dartmouth’s 269-acre (109 ha) main campus is in the rural Upper Valley region of New England. The university functions on a quarter system, operating year-round on four ten-week academic terms. Dartmouth is known for its strong undergraduate focus, Greek culture, and wide array of enduring campus traditions. Its 34 varsity sports teams compete intercollegiately in the Ivy League conference of the NCAA Division I.
Dartmouth is consistently cited as a leading university for undergraduate teaching by U.S. News & World Report. The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education listed Dartmouth as the only majority-undergraduate, arts-and-sciences focused, doctoral university in the country that has “some graduate coexistence” and “very high research activity”.
The university has many prominent alumni, including many members of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. governors, billionaires, U.S. Cabinet secretaries, Nobel Prize laureates, U.S. Supreme Court justices, and a U.S. vice president. Other notable alumni include Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholarship recipients, and Pulitzer Prize winners. Dartmouth alumni also include many CEOs and founders of Fortune 500 corporations, high-ranking U.S. diplomats, academic scholars, literary and media figures, professional athletes, and Olympic medalists.
Comprising a small undergraduate population and total student enrollment, Dartmouth is the smallest university in the Ivy League. Its undergraduate program is characterized by the Carnegie Foundation and U.S. News & World Report as “most selective”. Dartmouth offers a broad range of academic departments, an extensive research enterprise, numerous community outreach and public service programs, and the highest rate of study abroad participation in the Ivy League.
Dartmouth, a liberal arts institution, offers a four-year Bachelor of Arts and ABET-accredited Bachelor of Engineering degree to undergraduate students. The college has 39 academic departments offering 56 major programs, while students are free to design special majors or engage in dual majors. The most popular majors: economics, government, computer science, engineering sciences, and history. The Economics Department also holds the distinction as the top-ranked bachelor’s-only economics program in the world.
In order to graduate, a student must complete 35 total courses, eight to ten of which are typically part of a chosen major program. Other requirements for graduation include the completion of ten “distributive requirements” in a variety of academic fields, proficiency in a foreign language, and completion of a writing class and first-year seminar in writing. Many departments offer honors programs requiring students seeking that distinction to engage in “independent, sustained work”, culminating in the production of a thesis. In addition to the courses offered in Hanover, Dartmouth offers 57 different off-campus programs, including Foreign Study Programs, Language Study Abroad programs, and Exchange Programs.
Through the Graduate Studies program, Dartmouth grants doctorate and master’s degrees in 19 Arts & Sciences graduate programs. Although the first graduate degree, a PhD in classics, was awarded in 1885, many of the current PhD programs have only existed since the 1960s. Furthermore, Dartmouth is home to three professional schools: the Geisel School of Medicine (established 1797), Thayer School of Engineering (1867)—which also serves as the undergraduate department of engineering sciences—and Tuck School of Business (1900). With these professional schools and graduate programs, conventional American usage would accord Dartmouth the label of “Dartmouth University”; however, because of historical and nostalgic reasons (such as Dartmouth College v. Woodward), the school uses the name “Dartmouth College” to refer to the entire institution.
Dartmouth employs a large number of tenured or tenure-track faculty members, including the highest proportion of female tenured professors among the Ivy League universities, and the first black woman tenure-track faculty member in computer science at an Ivy League university. Faculty members have been at the forefront of such major academic developments as the Dartmouth Workshop, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, Dartmouth BASIC, and Dartmouth ALGOL 30. Sponsored project awards to Dartmouth faculty research amount to $200 million.
Dartmouth serves as the host institution of the University Press of New England, a university press founded in 1970 that is supported by a consortium of schools that also includes Brandeis University, The University of New Hampshire, Northeastern University, Tufts University and The University of Vermont.
Rankings
Dartmouth ranks very highly among undergraduate programs at national universities by U.S. News & World Report. U.S. News also ranks the school very highly for veterans, very highly for undergraduate teaching, and for “best value” at national universities. Dartmouth’s undergraduate teaching was ranked very highly by U.S. News. Dartmouth College is accredited by The New England Commission of Higher Education.
In Forbes’ rankings of 650 universities, liberal arts colleges and service academies, Dartmouth ranks very highly overall and in research universities. In the Forbes “grateful graduate” rankings, Dartmouth comes very highly.
The Academic Ranking of World Universities ranked Dartmouth very highly among the best universities in the nation. However, this specific ranking has drawn criticism from scholars for not adequately adjusting for the size of an institution, which leads to larger institutions ranking above smaller ones like Dartmouth. Dartmouth’s small size and its undergraduate focus also disadvantage its ranking in other international rankings because ranking formulas favor institutions with a large number of graduate students.
The Carnegie Foundation classification listed Dartmouth as the only “majority-undergraduate”, “arts-and-sciences focus[ed]”, “research university” in the country that also had “some graduate coexistence” and “very high research activity”.
The Dartmouth Plan
Dartmouth functions on a quarter system, operating year-round on four ten-week academic terms. The Dartmouth Plan (or simply “D-Plan”) is an academic scheduling system that permits the customization of each student’s academic year. All undergraduates are required to be in residence for the fall, winter, and spring terms of their freshman and senior years, as well as the summer term of their sophomore year. However, students may petition to alter this plan so that they may be off during their freshman, senior, or sophomore summer terms. During all terms, students are permitted to choose between studying on-campus, studying at an off-campus program, or taking a term off for vacation, outside internships, or research projects. The typical course load is three classes per term, and students will generally enroll in classes for 12 total terms over the course of their academic career.
The D-Plan was instituted in the early 1970s at the same time that Dartmouth began accepting female undergraduates. It was initially devised as a plan to increase the enrollment without enlarging campus accommodations, and has been described as “a way to put 4,000 students into 3,000 beds”. Although new dormitories have been built since, the number of students has also increased and the D-Plan remains in effect. It was modified in the 1980s in an attempt to reduce the problems of lack of social and academic continuity.
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